


100 Prompt challenge

by orphan_account



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Multi, One-shot anthology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-05-30 23:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 99
Words: 217,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6445972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Here's the first prompt, which I suppose I won't really be posting in chronological order. I just got a good idea for the first prompt first, so away we go.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Prompt one: Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the first prompt, which I suppose I won't really be posting in chronological order. I just got a good idea for the first prompt first, so away we go.

First impressions?

Of competence, but not commitment. A strong mind in a stronger body that was not contented to be a dog’s body or an expendable. Someone with ideas, but not the time or patience to express them very often. Definitely not someone who liked authority. It was not that he did not like authority or considered himself above it; he just thought hierarchies in general were a stupid idea and easily led to corruptness and unnecessary death.

First thoughts?

One she can barely stop herself from vocalising as she looks him over, her hand gripping his in possibly the firmest hand-shake of her life.  
She thinks: how is that coat containing him?

He just gives the impression of bigness. Not an intimidating or unpleasant one- it’s kind of like walking past a ripening field and noting that the crops are straining to get out of their ears and cases and the like. There’s almost too much of him for his body, and that body is pushing 6 foot and 3 inches, and easily 90 kg. Almost the same size as her, although she is much slimmer and much, much lighter in weight. 

Sigrun is kind of afraid he might explode. She has the urge to either treat him gingerly, or the sense of a challenge- she feels as if the solidity of that hand and the strength of the arm attached to it is just calling for a beating. Like, telling her to come on and give it her best.  
Try beating him with a stick or throwing him off a cliff. See how much or how little it will hurt him. See if she can overwhelm him and prove her mightiness.

The challenge is in his eyes, too.

“Captain Sigrun Eide,” says her uncle “And Medic Mikkel Madsen.”

 

First impressions?

She looks insane.  
Not the gentle kind of insane either- the one which can be packed into a strait-jacket and persuaded to leave with medication and therapy and support from whatever loved-ones she may have. The kind of insanity which is inherent and ingrained and taught and taught meticulously for the majority of her life. Whoever trained her must have trained her as if they were taming a wild beast. Whoever raised her must have given her bones to teethe on and a club instead of a rattle.

First thoughts?  
Sigrun, as in the Valkyrie? If the old Norwegian means he is introducing the famous warrior woman from Valhalla, then he believes him without shade of doubt.

She’s tall and slim. She would look at home in the forests of her birth nation, standing among the samplings, looking like one of them but for her red hair. That can’t be a natural colour. It probably started blonde and became redder and redder gradually, as she was splashed by the blood of her enemies and opponents.  
And he gets the sense she wants to add him to that stain. She’s running out of dye- out of the urge to go and make the dye, because she needs inspiration.

Something a little more than what she already has. She wants to be inspired. The challenge is in her eyes.

He wonders if she knows what she is asking him, or if she means to ask it at all. Does she know there’s that hunger in her smile for some adventure, and that little tremor in her hand is holding back all of her strength, which she must expend on something that will snap or crunch in her grip.

Out of a small fear this unfortunate thing might be his own hand, Mikkel lets go first.

 

“Good to meet you.”  
It is all Sigrun can do not to punch him directly in the nose to see if he will spring back up, like one of those old-world punching clowns.

 

“I look forward to working with you.”  
It is all Mikkel can do not to grab her again and fling her over his head, and say ‘that good enough for you?’

 

Trond stands between the two new colleagues.  
He looks at his niece first, then at the Dane. Hopefully, when they have had the chance to assert alpha-ship and butted heads a few times, they will get along as swimmingly as he has predicted.


	2. Prompt 4: dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this interpretation is probably wildly different from the others of this prompt. I know there's probably not going to be a conveniently atmospheric full lunar eclipse on the team's little trip, but wouldn't it be cool if there was? Yeah. And if some astronomical improbability allowed one half of the world to be completely shrouded in total darkness while the rest was having the weirdest night ever.
> 
> Like, really improbable, but just probable enough to squeeze into a prompt it we pretend science isn't a thing for a few minutes.

It is a Tuesday when Tuuri pulls over the tank to the side of a long, deserted road- deserted of rot or ruin of any kind, as well as any life apart from the trees- and shoos everyone out of the tank.

Sigrun is confused; she did not order this movement, so assumes something must be wrong with the tank. Emil is even more confused; he didn’t hear Sigrun tell Tuuri to pull over the tank, so automatically assumes something must be wrong with their driver. Reynir is confused as well; he is always confused, though, because he cannot understand most of what is being said around him, so he assumes the fault of his confusion is his own.  
Mikkel and Lalli know exactly what is going on. The kitty, too, seems to know something is coming.

“What’s going on?” Sigrun asks “Are we having mechanical problems? I did hear a huge bang a while back.”

Tuuri jabs her thumb at her cousin, who is staring unblinkingly up at the cloud-cover “That was just him tripping in the cockpit. I hope you don’t mind, Sigrun, but I thought this would be a good thing for the team.”  
She pulls a book out from underneath her coat and opens it to a dented page, which has somehow retained some of its gloss over the past 90 years. On the page is an illustration of the sun passing behind the moon in phases, then out from underneath it.

“Today is a Tuesday,” she begins “A Tuesday in winter, in the old-world month of October. In a few minutes there is going to be a total eclipse of the sun by the moon.”

“An eclipse?” repeats Emil “Really? I’ve never seen one of those before.”

Sigrun cocks an eyebrow “Interesting. Too dark to drive, right?”

Tuuri nods, encouraged that Sigrun has yet to toss her back into the tank by her collar “I thought we might as well watch it outside. The trolls probably won’t like it. Lalli told me every time there’s some kind of celestial event, trolls head for the hills. He’s seen a troll playing dead in a meteor shower before,” she nudges his arm and repeats herself in Finnish.

Lalli nods. He is completely disinterested in anything not directly related to the moon, which is quite visible in the strong sun of the day. The clouds are minimal and moving in swift winds. Should the moon really slip in front of the sun, then the view is going to be fantastic.  
A little rough on the retinas, perhaps, but phenomenal all the same.

“Tuuri and I have been working on correlating the old-world system of counting days and dates with our current one. What she has is called an almanac. It’s a kind of encyclopaedia for future events the old-world science could predict.”

Sigrun is understandably sceptical. In her life, what she has been able to predict have been the movement and habits of trolls. That is the extent of her science. And now they’re telling her about some kind of old-world wizardry that allowed the pre-Rash people to guess when their moon was going to step in front of their sun?  
If it weren’t for the resident (and officially hired) mage staring fixedly at the sky, Sigrun would think the book-keepers were pulling her leg.

But the look on Lalli’s face is the kind of strained expectation that cannot be faked.  
He knows something is coming. A celestial event like an eclipse would certainly be enough to freak out a mage, whose powers are heavily dependent on nature. When nature starts doing freaky things like blotting out the world’s only source of light and heat, of course the mages are going to get a little skittish.

“So you know the time this eclipse is supposed to happen?”

“Noon.” says Tuuri “Which is in about five minutes. We still use the same system of tracking time as they do. Officially, I mean. Some people have switched over to using farmer’s hours for convenience, but you know. Noon will always be twelve o’clock.”

Sigrun relents. The last few days have been difficulty after difficulty. She kind of messed up the mission by herself, by getting dunked over and over again by the bastard troll (some kind of Rash-sick seal, perhaps?) and then walking for close to two hours in dropping temperatures, protected only by a borrowed, dry coat. That made her sick, of course.  
Hypothermia had got a few teeth in her by the time Tuuri threw open the door of the Cat-tank to let them in, but Mikkel was able to swiftly despatch it.

A fever lingered for a few days. Sigrun had watched stronger warriors than her try to plough on through fevers and make themselves even sicker, sometimes fatally so. So, the mission stalled. It had to be paused for a few days. The city behind them was haunted like crazy, as Reynir had told them, but this side was relatively safe. They could scavenge on the outskirts, nervous though it made them.  
For a few days and against her better judgement, Sigrun let Emil and Lalli out to explore the buildings on the fringes for anything of import.

There losses were not complete; the boys stumbled (literally, stumbled) across a person library and came back with some volumes of old-world philosophy, which some old biddy with too much money and time on their hands was sure to snap up back in the Known World. Also, a few medical textbooks with procedures so simple they could probably be adapted into Known World-medicine.  
Sigrun was watching Mikkel’s face when he was handed that book and reflected on the fact that she’d never really seen him smile. She didn’t know he could make his face light up like that. Crazy bastard.

Maybe a miniature Ragnarok would put a smile on that stony face.

“Alright. Keep your eyes out for a roving troll, though.”

Tuuri’s smile nearly splits her face in half. She folds the book shut with a clap and threads her arm through Lalli’s. She whispers something to him in jovial Finnish. This elicits no real response from him. He kind of just pats her on the forearm like ‘how nice for you’.

Reynir is also growing visibly nervous. He keeps shaking his head, more vigorously each time, as if he is trying to clear a head-ache. Loping over to the Hotakainens, he mutters something to Tuuri, and Tuuri relays it to Lalli. Whatever he says improves Reynir’s mood a little bit, enough to plunk himself down in the snow to watch the sky.

Everyone takes a cue to sit, leaning back on their arms and elbows, and, in Sigrun’s case, laying on her back with her arms behind her head.

“Emil, you ever seen an eclipse before?”

“No, there haven’t been any in my life-time. Or yours, right?”

Sigrun squints at him “How old do you think I am?”

Unaware that he has stumbled onto thin ice, Emil makes a blind guess “Twenty-eight?”

She snorts “Do I look like that much of a baby to you?”

“Twenty-nine?”

Now Mikkel is amused “I fail to see how he could confuse the natural contours of your face for baby-fat.”

“Cork it, medic man. I’m over thirty.”

“Thirty five?”

“Oh come on! Even Mikkel’s not that old.”

Emil is now wishing he had read those files. The numbers, at least, he would have been able to understand. Why didn’t he read those files?  
“Thirty three?”

“In the summer.’

“Oh so you’re thirty-two!”

“Ey, the boy can do basic maths. Good for him.”

Reynir points at the sky and says something cheerful in his gibberish. Sigrun looks towards Mikkel for translation, who says “Reynir wants to know how long the eclipse will last and if they’re going to be able to do any magic during it.”

It’s Tuuri’s turn for translating, but she has to finish giggling first “He- he told Reynir not to try, or his brain is going to blow out of his ears.”

“That’s really gross. Tuuri, tell him not to be so gross.”

“Aye aye Captain.”

“What are we, pirates?”

The small talks continues like this for about ten minutes, before the moon and the sun start to misbehave visibly.   
Sigrun isn’t sure if she’s the only one who’s just enjoying the talk, but probably not. It’s always nice to sit back, relax, and have a gab. Even if it is in several languages and frequently has to be translated.

 

The first piece of the moon inches in front of the sun. Suddenly, the sun’s glare becomes infinitely fiercer as if it is trying to melt the rock slithering in front of it. Everyone shields their eyes. Both of the mages flinch visibly as the shadow spreads over the sun.

“Hey, I just thought…do you think they know what’s going on at home?” asks Emil “I’m sure the people in the cities know what an eclipse is, but what about the countryside? And they might not know what one looks like even if they know the word.”

Tuuri furrows her brow “Actually, back in Keuruu they used to run little classes for all ages. There was this one family that had started out with a school-teacher…uh, you know, you know what a high-school is?”

“Sure.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

Mikkel whispers to Sigrun “Think of the worst years of your life with homework.”

She understands immediately “Oh, we just called that ‘prison’ when I was there.”

Tuuri continues “So this family had passed down their knowledge from this high-school science teacher that started the line. They used to be a nice little thing to do on a slow Sunday, you know? The woman who ran the class told us about outer-space and satellites and celestial events. You know there are probably about a billion other planets with life on them, aside from us?”

“Let’s hope they don’t come and visit us until we’ve cleaned up this Rash mess.” says Sigrun flatly.

After that, no one says anything else.

They just watch in silence as the moon slowly engulfs the sun. The temperature seems to drop, though it is impossible that the mere seconds the sun has spent covered have robbed the earth of all of its residual warmth. Light still spills out everywhere, but it appears as thunder or perhaps a strand of electricity turned liquid. Like a leak has sprung in the heavens and one of the gods has stuffed a small planetoid into the hole until the plumber can attend to it.

There is enough light to see each other by. Plenty to observe the landscape with, as the two mages cannot help but do. With the sun gone, it is almost as if something was removed which was keeping the spirits of the Silent World from communicating.  
It is a Silent World no longer. 

For perhaps the first time since Reynir stumbled into the little-mission, he and Lalli exchange a sympathetic look. They are on the same page, hearing and understanding the same things.   
From the way that their team-mates have yet to panic, they have both deduced they are the only ones able to hear what is being said. Whispered, more like, from the shadows that have grown up behind everything.  
There are some things only mages should have to hear. Those unprepared for the spirits’ grief- those who have not been hearing them, dreaming of them and seeing them skulking in the darkness all of their lives- would likely not survive the experience intact.

To Lalli, it is an annoying buzz in his ear that makes him think of his cousin. He sincerely hopes Onni isn’t hearing what he is hearing, although there is no reason why he should not.  
To Reynir, it is disconcerting. So much pain. So much sadness. So many other emotions he, in his short and sheltered life, has not yet had the occasion to experience. He sincerely hopes he never has to, either.

For a full four minutes, the world is shrouded in darkness. If there is ever to be another certainty in global history as to what the entire world was doing at one moment in time, it is this moment.  
The population of the world may be scant, harassed, sick and staggering under the pressure of being the survivors of such a horrible disease. There may be entire countries deserted by humanity. Continents perhaps.

Whatever the case may be, wherever there is life, that life is doing exactly what this team of six and their cat find themselves doing; putting down their work, their weapons. Tilting heads up to the sky and staring in awe and horror as the sun and the moon abandon their usual positions for this fantastic display. The view will not be the same all around the world, but nor will it be unnoticed on the other side of the world. 

At this moment, the entire world is conscious of standing in a penumbra.

Utterly still, and, save for the chatter of the dead, utterly silent.


	3. Prompt 12: insanity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emil/Lalli  
> Mikkel is also there. Mentions of others.

“I cannot believe this happening to us.”

The year is 94. Emil Vasterstrom is twenty-three years old, but tends to feel much younger in situations such as these. Infantile and helpless. Completely unable to control or resolve a single factor in what’s going to happen to him.  
All of the decisions about his survival are going to have to be made for him, which he really, really does not like. So, in times like these, though he wishes he had out-grown the habit which probably pisses himself off the most, he starts to complain. Not whine, mind you, but just a few subtle, well-worded complaints thrown in here and there.

At least he isn’t throwing a screaming fit like the woman in the green jacket, who seems like she is about to lay an egg in her fit. The member of staff who initially came over to placate her isn’t even trying to shut her up anymore; they just stand there, their face grim and sullen, their short hair being blown back in the woman’s gales of rage.

Emil and his travelling companion, one Mikkel Madsen, stand at a safe-distance from the screaming woman. They are leaning on the railings of the boat and staring at the frozen sea.

Mikkel doesn’t seem the least bit put-off. Emil blames his age; the man is only a few weeks away from turning thirty-eight, which puts him almost in his grave from Emil’s perspective. When one reaches a certain age, one kind of stops caring what happens. One has to kind of go with the flow, like a dead fish caught in a current.

He actually has the nerve to be enjoying their predicament “The last time the ocean froze like this, I was a child. Consider yourself lucky to see this, Emil. This almost never happens.”

Emil knits his brow “Yes, but why does it have to happen when we’re on the ocean? Why couldn’t this- this phenomena of nature wait to be all phenomenal until after we docked?”

Mikkel shrugs his massive shoulders “The gods of nature don’t wonder about inconveniencing us mortals when they go about their business.”

Emil mutters something unintelligible about the gods being jerks. He keeps his voice low, just in case one of them happens to be listening. Spending a winter cooped up in a tank with ghosts scratching at the door and two mages breathing down his neck definitely made him more superstitious and willing to believe in the unbelievable.  
Also, the fact that his significant other is one of the most accomplished Finnish mages around has pretty much disposed of any lingering doubts he might have clung to after the long winter. 

Emil has no doubt some god, Finnish, Swedish, Sami, or perhaps all of them, are standing back and grinning at the little piece of chaos they have caused on this boat. The bastards. But Mikkel is right- he usually is. Why would the gods give a damn that Emil needs to be in Keuruu by the end of the week?  
Why would they care that Emil has a life and a boyfriend he’s desperate to see and some little cousins to visit. Well, not so little anymore. They’ve been too big to pick up for about two years now, and Emil gets the sense they’re going to be taller than him by the time this damned boat gets unstuck from the ice.

The ice just crept up on them out of nowhere. Froze them, literally and figuratively, to the spot. As he broods, half of the boat’s staff and a few volunteering passengers are cutting at the ice with pick-axes, as well as a chainsaw that one industrious passenger brought along, presumably for some troll hunting or recreational murder.

The progress is not promising. At this rate, they might be free sometime during early June. Right now, in October, Emil feels he really cannot afford to wait any longer.

“Mikkel.”

“Emil.”

“Hypothetically, if I were to walk back to Denmark-”

“You would die.”

“Hypothetically if you and I were to walk back to Denmark,” he pauses in case Mikkel wants to interject another prediction of death and doom, but his friend remains silent “How long would it take us?”

“We’re only about ten kilometres out. Maybe two hours at the most. The sea has been quite glassy today, so I doubt we would have much of a problem with walking over swells and the like.”

Scanning the horizon, Emil can see only a thick, unbroken blanket of grey clouds. Neither terribly encouraging nor threatening. The snowfall is light, and it does not seem to be a precursor to the kind of violent blizzard it would take to bury them.  
Still, the boat cannot afford to wait much longer. The stress of being frozen in place has apparently done something to the boiler, so now the only heat to be had on-board is body heat and that which is thrown off by the single, small fire the captain allowed to be built.

Emil does not like these chances. He doesn’t like the idea of Lalli and the rest of his family waiting on him, with no idea of why his boat has not come in or why he has not tried to get into contact with them. Lalli won’t immediately jump to the worst conclusion, but he won’t be able to talk Siv or Torbjörn out of prematurely burying their missing nephew either. Empty-casket funeral, of course. Probably plant him in the back-yard next to the old family dog and Bosse’s mother.

“Shit.” says Emil “I need to tell them I’m not dead.”

“I’ll speak with the captain.”

Whatever Mikkel says must be convincing, because not ten minutes after he left does he return, captain in tow, along with several other senior members of staff. They don’t seem to be interested in Emil’s reasons for wanting to walk across the frozen ocean. They seem more interested in asking if he’s THE Västerström from the Long Winter, and if he really killed his first troll with his bare hands like the legends say.  
Emil doesn’t answer this. He just asks if there’s a spare rifle laying around.

No one ever asks about Mikkel. About half of Denmark is named Madsen, so no one ever makes the connection. Not unless they’re one of those students of the Winter who has read the accounts (mostly penned by Tuuri, although all of them contributed by recounting what had happened, pointing out typos and complaining about the way she described them) and knows Mikkel from his sideburns, which are still as majestic and flowing as they were the day Emil met him.

They climb down the side of the boat via a ladder and wish good luck to the employees and passengers, still hacking diligently away at the thick ice without an inch of bare black water as their reward. The woman wielding the chainsaw gives a casual salute. With the chainsaw hand. She narrowly misses shaving off half of her face.

“This wind is awful.” observes Emil.

With the relatively flat plain of the ocean stretching out on all sides, the wind is free to tear across at a gale-force rate. They have to shout to be heard. On the bright side, every now and then the wind drops and they have a minute or two of still air to adjust their coats and scarves, and rest throats that are sore from shouting.

“Do you mean to return to the docks?” asks Mikkel “I assumed we were going to the docks. I should have asked before we left.”

“I guess we’re heading for wherever we get first? We’re armed. We’re dangerous. Even if we do end up in troll territory, we’ve faced worse.”

They are quiet for a moment, though the wind is low and this would be an ideal moment for talk.

“I hate being known.” says Emil.

Mikkel seems just the tiniest bit smug “I imagine you do. I wouldn’t know the pain.”

Emil gives him a look “If you didn’t have a name that half of your country has, then you would.”

The topics chop and change as they cross the ice.  
Because of the amount of time the old crew of the Long Winter spends with each other across the year, they are all pretty much up to speed on each other’s lives. Tuuri and Reynir are thinking about getting married in the summer. Sigrun’s parents are baying for a grandchild before her biological clock runs out, and Sigrun is still far more interested in the campaign against the Giant infestation which has just been launched in Trondheim, Sweden. Emil is a Cleanser and Lalli is a mage working with his outfit, whose power has done something like quadrupled since the Long Winter, making him one of the most powerful mages around and definitely the weirdest person his friends can claim to know. Mikkel is Sigrun’s deputy half of the time, and the other half of the time he spends lending his expertise on the Rash (gathered and borrowed from materials collected during the Long Winter)

So, because they are pretty much up to speed on each other’s lives, Mikkel and Emil mostly talk about silly things. Say, what would happen if Sigrun was locked in a room with a herd of Giants. They give the figurative Sigrun a variety of ludicrously inadequate weapons with which to defend herself- dentures, a half-eaten apple, the sole of an old boot and one metre of copper wiring- in each new scenario and amuse themselves by guessing how long it would take for her to dispatch them.  
By the time they have run through ten scenarios, all of which were finished with Sigrun victorious and uninjured in under ten minutes, the wind has died down a little bit.

The pseudo-fog that the frantic flurries of snow in the wind created have gone. Denmark’s craggy, forested shore looms out of the collapsing mist and sits there, silent and welcoming.

“This isn’t the docks.” notes Emil.

Mikkel points a little further along the shoreline “Look, between the trees. See the staircase?”

“That thing? That’s a fallen log.”

“To your left. Other left. No, the other other- there you go. See it?”

“I’m still looking at a fallen log.”

“Then will you trust me when I say there is definitely a staircase over there which I remember taking? And will you please just admit you need glasses and go to a doctor?”

“Now I see it.”

“Oh, do you now?”

Frowning at him, Emil points out the elusive staircase “Right there. And I don’t need any glasses.”

“Whatever you say,” responds Mikkel evenly.

The staircase is quite a ways up a slope. A slope which falls sharply into a cliff, to which the ocean apparently froze to at a very steep angle. An angle too steep to even attempt to climb without rope, climbing gear and some of those dumb pointy shoes Norwegian hunters wear when working in cities, so they won’t slip all over ice on the cracked pavement.  
Rather than wasting their time, Emil and Mikkel walk parallel to the shore for a good half hour before they reach a spot where the frozen water is flesh with the ledge of the land.

They step onto the frosted grass, crunching cautiously away from a grassy shoreline and into the trees.  
Being that they are both experienced Cleansers, the men really don’t have that much to fear from the woods. Since assuming a deputyship under Sigrun Eide, Mikkel has gone a little stir-crazy. He is now known among the cleansing circles for being able to crunch a troll head between his palms, or pop one off by fixing it in a head-lock and pulling gently. Needless to say, Sigrun is quite pleased with the monster she has created.

Emil, too, is nothing short of an excellent Cleanser now. As it turns out, spending a bit of time as the focus of Sigrun’s attention is a really, really, good way to become proficient in killing, burning and otherwise destroying trollkind.

Still, they are cautious. There is no telling what insidious horrors might be lurking in these woods.

“Ho, there!”

Emil twitches “Did you hear that?”

Scanning the woods, Mikkel nods “Of course I did.”

“Thank the gods. I’ve started to see spirits, did I tell you that? See them and hear them- that’s what I get for spending too much time with a mage.”

“Should I respond?”

They mull it over together for a few moments. In that time, the voice calls out three more times. Closer each time. Finally it comes within the range where they can judge it to belong to an older person, most likely a man. And very definitely a human.

Mikkel calls back “Yes?”  
Polite as ever.

The owner of the voice emerges from the brush a second later. It is an old man, though not one bent or wasted in his old age. He is about Tuuri’s size (dainty) and about Tuuri’s build (chubby and possibly made of steel, because her arms are so muscled by now, thanks to spending all of her time under the hoods of tanks with heavy tools, she looks like she’s been taking some of those old-world steroids) and about Trond’s age. Maybe a little younger or older. It’s quite difficult to tell with old Danes, Emil has found. They just seem to be an ageless people. Must be something in the air, or something in those lovingly tended crops.

The old man advances with a friendly enough look on his face “The ocean froze. I assume you’re from the boat that disembarked a few hours ago?”

Mikkel nods “We are. I’m afraid we ran into a spot of trouble. We’ve come back to organise some help.”

“That can all be arranged.” the old man’s watery eyes swivel to Emil “Long walk? You’re a bit wind-blasted there, lad.”

“Ah,” Emil runs a hand through his wind-swept hair “Yes, it was windy…sir?”

The old man’s face has suddenly grown very, very dark and dangerous. The glint in his eye has changed from that typical good-humoured glint all old people seem to have to something demonic.

“Swede.” he hisses under his breath.

“Uh.” replies Emil.

The old man stoops and gropes along the forest floor until he finds a sizeable stick.

“Oh gods,” groans Mikkel “Emil, you better run.”

Emil has begun to back away from the old man, who is almost slavering with rage at this point.

“What did I do?”

“It’s an old, stupid, stupid law! I didn’t think it was going to be a problem.” now, he turns his attention to the old man in an attempt to placate him “Sir, I know you think you have a patriotic duty to beat my friend with a stick but I can assure you there is no call for it. My friend here is perfectly harmless.”

The old man licks his lips, hefting the stick in anticipation “Nonsense! Your ‘friend’ is a Swede! He’s here for our women, isn’t he? Aren’t you here for our women, Swede?”

“Uh.” says Emil again.

“Speak up!” snaps the old man.

Emil ducks behind a sapling, peering cautiously around the slim trunk “No, sir, I can honestly say I have no interest in your women. I have a boyfriend. Women don’t hold any interest for me in…in whatever the way you think it is I’ll be coming after your women.”

The old man’s eyes bug and point in different directions for a few seconds. He becomes too livid to speak. He can only snort for a few seconds as a froth forms in the corner of his wrinkled mouth.

“Poof!” he bellows “The Swedes are sending their poofs now!”

“Oh wonderful. He’s a homophobe too.” says Mikkel, making a shooing gesture at Emil “You really should run.”

“I can’t leave you with that crazy man! He might turn on you!” protests Emil.

“He won’t. I’m Danish- you’re not, which is his complaint. Your Swedish accent is really pissing him off Emil, he thinks it’s his duty to beat you with a stick.”

The old man takes a sudden swing at Mikkel, who dodges easily, but shakily. He wasn’t expecting that.

“You!” he spits “You dare to take the Swede’s side? Where’s your stick, son? This Swede is clearly leading an invasion! They’re going to cross our sea! Steal our women!”

“What the Hel do I want your women for? I have my own man!”

For the second time, the old man’s eyes bug out in different directions. He swings the stick blindly and strikes a tree next to him. Little spots of snow rain down as he continues “Fie on all poofs! Two men together! No, who does the sewing?”

“He does! I stitch my shirt to things whenever I try!”

“Cleaning!”

“Shared duty!”

“Cooking!”

“We take turns!”

“Child-birthing!”

“Adoption! We’re thinking about that, actually. When we’re in our thirties, I mean.”

The old man is so enraged he throws the stick at Emil’s sapling. Emil has only to step back smartly to avoid the projectile, but he finally takes the hint to run.

“Mikkel, I’m headed for the stairs! Stay away from him as much as you can. He looks like he might bite you.”

Emil dashes past the old man.  
His attacker scoops up another stick and sets off in hot pursuit, with surprising agility for one of his age.

“Come back and face me Swede! Denmark will never fall to you blondies, you hear me? Never!”

 

An hour later, help is secured for the boat. ‘Crazy old man Hagbard’ has been calmed down by some other Danes with a cup of weak tea and assurances that the nasty Swede is gone, and Emil is recovering from his experience in the radio room.

Lalli has just finished cracking up on the other end of the connection “But you’re sure you’re alright?”

“I’m sure. He never managed to land a blow. It was scarier than most of the hunts I’ve ever been on. You can’t imagine- I looked over my shoulder, and there he was, a little closer, a little madder and the stick is swinging the entire time like a sword.” Emil pauses and rubs his temples, where the hesitant ache of a head-storm has begun to build “Gods, Lal, I honestly thought I might be beaten to death by an insane old codger with a mossy stick.”

“I’m glad you weren’t.”

“Don’t tell the others, alright? If they have to know I want to be the one to spread the news.”

“Scout’s honour, I won’t. Any idea of when you can get home?”

“Ferries are all out of commission. Obviously. But there’s a team that’s going to set out on the ice in a few hours with supplies and such, to help the ferry’s passengers finish the journey.”

A note of concern enters Lalli’s voice “You’re walking? On the frozen ocean? Well, watch out for trolls.”

“I will.”

“And old Danes with mossy sticks.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a Danish law, still in effect, which states that any time a Swede walks across the frozen ocean, a Dane is able to attack them. But only with a stick. No other weapons.
> 
> This old man remembers this law, and someone has to keep Denmark safe from those marauding Swedish people and their stupid, perfect hair


	4. 5: Seeking solace

It isn’t easy being a cat.

It isn’t easy being anything- human, troll, man, woman, one of those people who goes back and forth between the genders or doesn’t have one at all- no one has it easy.  
But cats have it harder.

This is what Kitty thinks, anyway. She has only just begun to think of herself as ‘Kitty’, and already this addition to her identity has opened a series of deep, philosophical questions. Kitty is only four months old and she has had to start questioning the very meaning of life itself.

And it’s all that other cat’s fault. She thinks of him as Large Cat, but is considering tacking on an ‘Evil’ in there somewhere. For, truly, he is evil. He constantly has it out for her, wanting to be the greatest and alpha-est cat in the tiny tank. Every time she has tried to approach Gold Human, Large Cat gets in the way.  
He does it in such an insidious, subtle way, half of the time Kitty isn’t even aware of being blocked from the solitude and safety of Gold Human’s lap until she is padding away, foiled once again.

Large Cat is a vessel for Evil. There is really no other explanation.

Kitty wouldn’t mind so much if she had some alternatives to the safety of Gold Human today, but she does not. Red Human took Mom Human, who is also red but has much, much more red than Red Human does, and they and Soft Human went off to go do something out in the Sickness. It is unusual for Red Human to go and do her human things without Gold Human and Large Cat, but Kitty isn’t complaining.

It is nice to mix it up a little bit every now and then. Gold Human is usually far too tired to play with her when he and Red Human get back from their human things in the Sickness, so her usual playmate is Mom Human, sometimes Best Human, if Best Human is in one of his rare indulgent moods.

Not that Gold Human is ready to play with her. He needs to sleep. He made that clear this morning when he tried to get up, then, upon hearing something from Red Human that must have been permission, collapsed back into his bedding and pulled a blanket over his head. To get out of Best Human’s way, he scooted under one of the bedding platforms and curled up in a way that reminds Kitty of her siblings.  
She can barely remember them now. Just the sensations they created. Frustration, when they would not share food. Comfort, when they couldn’t help but share their natural warmth at night.

After she had seen off Red Human and the other two with her customary fond yowling and miaowing, she returned to the tank and located Gold Human underneath his bedding platform. Best Human was doing his thing- being the most best human on the tank, and stuff, and shuffling through some of those weird tree-skinned squares humans put words inside- and Large Cat was up and about, though he didn’t look like he was going anywhere.

Before she entered the bedding room, she and Large Cat took a moment to stare each other down. Large Cat never hisses at her. She thinks it must have something to do with how much older and bigger he is. He may be a vessel for Evil, but he isn’t a meanie. He wouldn’t pick on someone smaller than him like that for no good reason.  
Say, if she ever bit him, Large Cat would probably hiss at her until he lost his voice. But she hadn’t done a thing to provoke his wrath, so he stayed still and held his tongue. They just stared at each other.

Kitty was satisfied that Large Cat was going to sit in the hallway, near the entrance to the Sickness outside. She trotted into the bedding room and found Gold Human asleep under a bedding platform. Kitty wasted no time in scooting underneath the bedding platform with him. She clambered over his sleepy body and found a warm spot to sit underneath his chin.  
Kitty curled up and purred fiercely. Gold Human was not the warmest human of them all- there is a reason Best Human is Best Human to Kitty, after all. On the other hand, Gold Human was very comfortable and Kitty had no trouble at all falling into a nice, drowsing sleep.

She dreamed kitty dreams of chasing huge, fat mice for her dinner and eating fresh spring grass to make herself barf later on. These are things she has never experienced, being born in the dead of winter, but her mother used to talk about them all the time. The little joys and triumphs that awaited Kitty and her siblings when the winter thawed and spring chased all of the snow away.

Kitty fully intends to make it to spring. She is saddened, knowing she will not make it with her siblings. To hunt with them and barf with them later would have been one of the greatest and most simple pleasures she could ever ask for.  
But it is not to be.

In her dreams, as she kills a juicy imagination-mouse and the imagination tastes fill her mouth, Kitty resolves she will share her first kill with someone. Not with Large Cat. His pride wouldn’t allow him to accept a mouse someone else caught.  
Mom-Human, on the other paw, would definitely appreciate the gesture and probably spend the rest of his day petting her and telling her how wonderful she is. 

As for the barfing? Well, Kitty will do that on her own. Somewhere Best Human will find it (possibly even step in it?) and be proud of her also, so he will pet her and give her praise in his quiet way.

With this pleasant thought on her mind, Kitty wakes herself up. She is aware of being slightly squished now and wants to change position before she loses all feeling in her limbs.

When she wakes up, she finds Gold Human is now cuddling her. He has turned over as well and there’s someone else down here with him- which is why she’s a little bit squished, napping between two chests.  
Kitty is surprised to find Large Cat is down here with Gold Human. They are dozing against each other peacefully, comfortably. Even more surprisingly, Large Cat doesn’t seem to mind that he is also almost cuddling her. While Gold Human’s hands hold her close to his own chest and neck, so she is tucked into him kind of like the way she used to cuddle with her siblings, Large Cat is also kind of cuddling up to her. Well, sharing her space. Her personal space.

Still, it counts, doesn’t it?  
And he’s actually sharing Gold Human with her, which never happens.

Deciding to make the best of the unexpected gift she has been given, Kitty starts to purr once more and nuzzles against Gold Human. Then, after a moment of thought, she turns and puts her muzzle on Large Cat’s chin. Just for a minute. Not long enough to wake him up and ruin the moment.

Kitty turns back and plants her face in Gold Human’s shoulder. In no time at all, she is back in her dreams of the coming spring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mom Human =Reynir  
> Best Human= Mikkel (presumably because he feeds her)  
> Soft Human= Tuuri  
> Gold Human = Emil  
> Large Cat = Lalli  
> Red Human = Sigrun


	5. 7: Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir died once, but he got better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a funny little idea. For those who will be confused, Frejr is the Norse god of the harvest, fertility and such. His name is also spelled Frey
> 
> And a small warning for some gore and major character semi-death

Reynir doesn’t remember hiding, but apparently that’s what happened?

Anyway, that’s what this huge blonde man is trying to explain to him.

“So…so walk me through this one more time…because I died with a knife in my hand, that technically means I died armed?”

The man nods, a hopeful look on his face. This is the first time Reynir has shown any form of comprehension in their ten-minute conversation.  
“And because you died a noble death, defending your flock. I mean, it is rare to have a hero come in with the claim of dying to defend their sheep, but you also did your nation a great service. That troll was the first and only to ever touch Icelandic soil, and you ensured it would not get any further inland.”

Reynir furrows his brow “So was I killed by the Rash? I thought it took days or weeks to kill off the host.”

“No!” the man rubs a temple with his forefinger, frowning “No, we’ve been through this. I told you. You took a nasty fall and hit your head very hard.”

“I’m confused.”

“So I’ve gathered. You are very, very confused.”

Reynir glances around them uncertainly. He keeps expecting someone to waltz out of the dazzling flowers that surround them on all sides, or drop from one of the huge, green-leafed trees towering overhead and scream ‘surprise! It’s just a joke!’.   
Or maybe it’s some kind of weird social experiment?

“Are you sure this is Valhalla?”

“Yes! Of course I’m sure it’s Valhalla!”

“I thought Valhalla was supposed to be a giant mead hall or something? Like, with a bunch of swashbuckling Vikings and Valkyries.”

The man, whose name Reynir still does not know, drops his head into his hands and groans “Vikings do not swashbuckle. They loot and pillage and sacrifice. Where the Hel did this image of the noble Viking come from? They were- they are a race of invaders, for Odin’s sake! Stop glorifying your invaders, young man!”

Reynir cannot help but feel a little offended “Uh, but they’re my culture? Ok, ok, Vikings don’t swashbuckle. I’m sorry. I didn’t meant to upset you.”

“No, it’s not your fault. It’s a much larger problem and I just- oh, it just pisses me off. Never mind. Do- do you feel sure of where you are now?”

Once again, Reynir looks at the forest. It’s like the most intense spring and summer ever, combined and magnified to be even more intense. He doesn’t really have words for how beautiful his surroundings are, except to say that they’re kind of freaking him out, what, with the flowers’ ethereal beauty and the violently green foliage of the trees.

“I’m in Valhalla.” he says slowly.

“Correct.”

“And I’m dead.”

“Also correct.”

“And…and I died nobly, saving Iceland and my sheep?”

“Yes.”

“But I took down the troll with my crook.” Reynir scoops a leafy stick from the forest floor to demonstrate “It was about this big? I whacked the troll so hard on the skull it skull kind of just fell open. Does that count as a weapon?”

“Well, yes.”

“But you said the knife got me in. I wasn’t even holding my knife. It was just on my leg. Oh, here, look! It came through with me!”

Reynir kneels and shows the man the knife strapped to his belt. It’s comforting, somehow, to know he was able to come through with everything he was wearing. No matter what happens from this point on, Reynir will at least be able to wear his favourite cloak and his strongest boots.   
He also has a gaping wound in his side from the scrap with the troll, caused by cutting his side open on a rock when it threw him about fifteen metres. Reynir didn’t notice this enormous wound until he died and woke up in Valhalla, with this strange and exasperated man leaning over him.

At the time of the fight, he was far too worried about his sheep to check himself over for wounds.  
And by the time the fight was over, his secret wound had already killed him anyway, so there wasn’t much for him to do but fall unconscious (and down a cliff, according to the man, who seems to know all of the details of Reynir’s death) and bleed out.

Suddenly, something occurs to Reynir. A very obvious question he probably should have asked the moment he found himself in this weird garden with its weirder occupant.  
“Who are you?”

“You don’t recognise me?” the man seems a little bit wounded.

“Uh,” Reynir is assuaged by a sudden, ferocious guilt. He truly feels he knows this man- that he has known him for most of his conscious life and now even in death, and it is a really terrible crime he is committing in not remembering this.   
He tries to come up with the name.

But again, all he can muster is “Uh.”

“Think on it. It may come to you.”

Reynir knits his eyebrows and concentrates “Well you’re definitely someone I know, but not someone I’ve ever met before.”

It’s coming to him. Slowly, slowly….and there it is!

“Freja!” he cries.

The man’s face falls “No!”

“No, you’re her twin! With the nature-y stuff and all the- the- uh, you’re the fertility god, right? Yeah! Oh, my gosh, I am so sorry! I’ve just never seen a picture of you that wasn’t, like, really blond and tall and with a massive- uh, you know. Massive symbol of…of male fertility.”

An awkward silence descends.

“Frejr.” says Reynir “You’re Frejr.”

Frejr does not look the way he has been depicted. Reynir has been lead to believe all of his religious life that Frejr would be a towering giant of a man with a mane of blond hair, pectorals the size of old-world watermelons, with an elk following him around loyally. In fact, Frejr is a man of average height, a slim build (almost the same size and height as Reynir himself), and his hair is the bracken-brown of a forest’s undergrowth.

Reynir doesn’t know how he expected a god to look, beyond extremely blond and noble. Frejr just doesn’t look like a god to him. Sure, there’s an aura of magical power around him. Not immensely so, which may be Reynir’s fault for being dead and having his nerves and senses slightly fried by this inconvenience.

Now faced with one of the gods that he’s been hearing about all of his life, Reynir isn’t quite sure what to do.  
It is one thing to worship a god and love them from afar for doing things like bringing what passes for spring in Iceland, and bringing on the new crop of lambs from his herd. But it is an entirely different thing to meet that god face-to-face and to be painfully aware of how much Reynir has been pissing him off with his inability to grasp the situation, and his own death overall.

“Thank you!” he blurts.

The god cocks an eyebrow “What for?”

“For blessing my herd with a good crop of lambs every year.”

Frejr snorts and plucks at the grass beside his knee. Where his fingers touch the grass, little pink blossoms sprout from stalks which were previously bare. Reynir tries not to gape.  
“I can’t accept responsibility for that. Your care of your flock was exemplary. You had many lambs because your herd weren’t stressed or starved. They were probably the best sheep in Iceland- I don’t know, I’ve been watching Sweden more carefully these days…lots of interesting things going on around that rail-line they have…there are not many shepherds who would die for their flock, son, so don’t give me credit for something I did not do. That’s the trouble with you mortals. Always assigning the blame and the glory to the wrong parties.”

Reynir doesn’t know what to say to that. So he opts for silence.  
It feels good just to sit here and watch the god. Healing, almost, like the sensation he used to get when he was floored by one of the few colds he ever caught as a child, watching his father brew this disgusting tea on the hearth that he only made when Reynir or one of his siblings were sick. It tasted as gross as it looked, and it looked like the water that collects in deep ditches by the side of the road after a significant snow-melt. But it made him feel good as well- like he was drinking light that was going to seep into his ever cell and blast the sickness out, rather than a concoction that worked just as well, but tasted like ditch-water and muddy grass.

“That’s enough.” says the god so suddenly Reynir nearly falls over backwards “We’ve wasted enough time explaining this death-thing. It’s time you went to Valhalla proper.”

“So…so this isn’t Valhalla? I thought you said-”

“Are you aware of the Tree of Worlds?”

“Of course! I am a pagan, you know. I do know my own religion.”

“This is the same branch-the same realm as Valhalla, but we’re not actually in the boundaries of Valhalla. We’re in the gardens. My gardens. You dropped dead into my garden.”

Reynir glances self-consciously at the weeping wound in his side. Until now, he did not notice how much he was bleeding. It’s kind of embarrassing; not only has he been thick-skulled about the whole concept of death and being dead without being conscious of dying, but he has bled all over his host’s nice green grass.  
Reynir surreptitiously tries to cram some of his tunic into the wound to staunch the bleeding, but the fabric is already saturated. He just looks like he’s trying to scratch himself.

Frejr stands and dusts leaves and moss from his bare knees “Can you stand?”

“Sure!”  
Yes, Reynir knows that is something he can definitely do.

Reynir takes a step after Frejr. Apparently, while he can stand, Reynir has forgotten how to walk because the step forward takes him backwards. And because Reynir’s legs are incredibly long, the step backwards is quite noticeable. A huge lunge of a step back that almost puts him at the back of the puddle of blood-stained flowers they have been sitting in to talk.

Frejr gives him an odd look “What are you doing?”

Looking down at his rebellious feet with panic, Reynir manages “I’m not sure?”

He takes another step back without meaning to. This one has him retreating into the tree-line.

“Oh.” says Frejr, his expression suddenly lighter “You’re not dead. Well, son, you had me fooled.”

“Wait, am I dead or am I not dead?”

“Neither, apparently. I wondered why you didn’t just appear in Valhalla like the normal people do. It’s because you’re in a limbo state, between life and death. It would seem life has won.”

“Huh? I thought I fell off a cliff.”

“It was a very small cliff. I may have been exaggerating.”

Reynir feels himself being sucked backwards and unable to even cling to a tree to stop himself for a few seconds. If only to figure out what the Hel is going on.  
Why do the confusing things always happen to him? Is it that they are inherently confusing things, or is Reynir just inherently confused?

“Am I dead or alive?”

Colours have begun to blur. The trees and flowers and his blood all smear together and suck past him, as if someone has pulled the drain at the back of the garden. Reynir watches in disgust and astonishment as his own spilled blood rockets back into his body, and a second later, the layers of muscle, tissue and wounded skin all pull back together to make the seam of a huge scar on his upper hip.

“Alive!” calls Frejr, who now seems to be standing at the front of a tunnel of blurred colour “You’re alive, son! And you better be grateful for that! Do something extraordinary with this- sheep are all well and good, but there is a bigger world out there! Go! Explore it!”

“Oh. Ok!” calls Reynir, suddenly excited.

He has always wanted to travel to a foreign country, and permission, no- an order to do so from a god? Good as it gets, right? 

The light at the end of the colour-tunnel becomes too bright to look at. Reynir shuts his eyes for fear of his corneas turning to ash in their sockets. When next he opens his eyes, the colours and lights have been replaced by a softer, less holy light- a light bulb, which means he’s in the hospital. And by the faces of his parents, who are largely red and puffy. His family has an unfortunate habit of swelling up like they are in the middle of an aggressive allergic reaction when they are crying. It comes from his father’s side of the family, as his father is demonstrating.

“Ow.” says Reynir, because his side feels like it was hit by a spikey sledgehammer.

His mother lets out a shriek. His father lets out a shriller shriek, alerting a doctor.

“Reynir!” cries his mother.

“My son!” cries his father, shortly before throwing himself around Reynir’s neck and blubbering like an infant.

After his parents had been calmed down (his father had to be sedated), the story came out. A mage happened to be passing when Reynir fought the troll. They ran to help, and arrived in time to see Reynir fall down a ledge and roll under the rock the troll had tossed him off of, removing him from harm.   
It was not a cliff that killed him, nor a fall on his head. Frejr was either sorely misinformed or lazy with his information gathering.

The mage blasted the troll in the rest of the faces which Reynir had yet to destroy. With the troll felled, they set to work on healing the worst of his wounds. The worst and almost the only was his side-gash. His bruises were many and so small they were negligible.   
All in all, apart from falling on his head and dying for a few minutes, Reynir was fine.

The same couldn’t be said for the place where he saw the troll, which had been essentially made into a smoking hole in the ground. Iceland did not have that many Cleansers because of its historical sterility concerning the Rash, and the ones that were around in Reynir’s area just kind of burned everything.

So, in spite of being at the very centre of Iceland’s first and only troll breach and dying for a little while, Reynir made it through alright.

 

“….and that’s how I got this scar.”

Tuuri glances between Reynir’s face and Reynir’s sinewy hip, where the huge scar starts and stretches a good length up his side and along his ribs.

“Ok.” she says slowly “That’s…that’s quite a complicated story.”

He shrugs and lowers his shirt again, over the scar “It’s not really complicated. Just…just very confusing, you know? It was a nice experience, actually, because now I don’t have to worry about whether or not Vahalla really exists. I was there, for a few minutes.”

From somewhere outside the tank, Mikkel’s calls for Reynir. He needs help with something. Reynir springs to his feet and dashes for the outside door. In his excitement, he doesn’t wait for Emil to get out of his way- he kind of vaults over him and somersaults out the door.

“What the Hel was that?” Emil looks after him “Gambolling like a lamb. Gods. He’s- Tuuri, are you alright?”

She shrugs “I’ve got a piece of advice for you, Emil. If you ever learn Icelandic, don’t ask Reynir where he got that scar on his side from. It’s…just make up your own story. Trust me on this one. You really don’t want to know what happened.”


	6. 16: Questioning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emilalli  
> Much gay things. Very ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Confused, sleepy people are one of my favourite things to write. Also, modern day AUs where for some reason everyone lives in the same country and speaks the same language.

His phone starts ringing sometime after 3 a.m.

At first, Lalli dismisses it as a particularly annoying component of the ambient noise of his dreams. He tries to ignore it as the sound of Godzilla roaring grows more and more persistent (Emil thought it was funny to change his text alerts and ringtones to Godzilla noises, and Lalli has not yet had the chance to change them back) until he can finally no longer write it off as a production of his own mind.  
Lalli jolts awake under Emil’s arm.

He squints at the nightstand and sees the culprit vibrating frantically. Swiping a Marina Lewycka novel out of his way, he scoops up the phone.  
So as not to wake Emil, he sits up and moves to the edge of the bed “Hello?”  
He has no idea who he is talking to; he’s too tired to check the caller I.D.

“Lalli.” says Onni “Where in the hell are you?”

He should have checked the caller I.D.

Lalli tries not to panic. He has never been a particularly eloquent or convincing liar. His family thinks of it as a sign of honesty. His boyfriend says it will probably get him killed one day, when he can’t convince a drug dealer that it wasn’t him that scraped his new BWM and left a rusty streak on the side, like garish lipstick on an unfaithful husband’s shirt collar.

“What do you mean?” he punctuates this with a yawn so as not to sound panicked.

“I mean where the hell are you? I just checked your bedroom and you weren’t there.”

He feels a prickle of irritation “Why’d you check my bedroom?”

“There was an explosion down the street. Old Lady Maggie turned her gas mains on and threw a match in through the window. She didn’t want her kids to get her house when she died- remember, we saw them having a fight about inheritance the other week? I wanted to make sure you weren’t scared.”

In his mind’s eye, Lalli can see his unmasker. Old Lady Maggie; toothless, with a smug gummy grin on her face. She was always going on about the gay agenda, wasn’t she? Well, she’s just gone and thrown a huge Onni-shaped wrench into it, so good for her. Lalli has no idea how he’s going to be able to talk his way out of this one.  
It takes all of his willpower just to make himself order in cafes and restaurants. He has nowhere near the verbal skill and finesse needed to conceal from his cousin that he was just sleeping curled up in another man’s arms.

Then, he realises something.  
What evidence does Onni have to go off that Lalli’s, as Old Lady Maggie would put it, a traitor to his gender? Onni is completely innocent of the real reason Lalli hangs around Emil so much. He doesn’t know squat.

Lalli might just be able to weasel his way out of this one.

“I’m at Emil’s.” 

“What are you doing at Emil’s at three in the goddamned morning?”

Wondering if he’s ever going to get the courage to come out. Wanting to crawl back under Emil’s arm and forget everyone else in the world, as it is so easy to do when they’re together.  
Nope. He’s not going to tell Onni that.

“He asked me to come over.”

“What for?”

Moment of truth. Lalli looks around the darkened room for inspiration. There’s the book he knocked off the nightstand, Emil’s coat over the back of the chair, a closed laptop, a few more books piled on Emil’s desk and a DVD on top of those. Some obscure American horror he borrowed from Reynir last week- ‘The Crazies’, that one Tuuri raves about where everyone goes whack because of the water and try to kill each other with pitchforks and fire.  
That’ll do.

“He…he thought he saw someone on his balcony. A man with a pitchfork.”

Onni pauses “A pitchfork? Is he drunk?”

“No. Emil’s just a little…little more imaginative than the rest of us when he hears a weird noise at night.”

Onni isn’t going to go for that “So he thought he saw a man with a pitchfork on his balcony, and instead of calling the police, he called you?”

Lalli prickles a little at the suggestion that he wouldn’t be able to protect Emil from a pitchfork wielding loon “I have a black belt in judo. I’m not helpless.”

A sigh on the other end of the line “It just doesn’t make sense.”

He spots another piece of inspiration on the nightstand, which he thankfully didn’t push to the ground in his sleepy efforts to shut his phone up “And he just started a stronger course of antidepressants. He might be worried some side-effects will kick in overnight.”

“Sounds like he made up the pitchfork man to get you over there. Spare his pride.”

“Hmm.”

“Well, is he alright?”

Lalli looks over at Emil and touches his shoulder lightly. Emil stirs, takes the edge of the blanket and pulls it over himself.  
Half asleep, he mutters “S’cold. Stop stealing the covers.”

Lalli helps Emil tuck himself in again “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. You’re entitled to sneak out to help a friend in need, I suppose.”

“Uh, yeah. Is Old Lady Maggie alright?”

“Oh, she’s happy as a clam. She was raving about how her children are never going to get anything now when the ambulance came for her. I think she’s going to an asylum? I hope so. She might get it in her head to burn down the rest of the neighbourhood, if her children say they want to re-build the house.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I want you back at home before nine o’clock, alright?”

This is a step up from his usual curfew. Usually, Lalli has to leave Emil’s apartment by six in the morning just to get back in at seven, before Tuuri starts shifting around in the kitchen and Onni comes in to wake him up.  
Great. He can sleep in today.

“Alright. Is everything ok? We won’t burn down or anything?”

“No. The fire’s out. The leak’s been patched up. Tuuri went back to sleep with Kitty. Everyone is ok. I’m sorry I woke you.”

“It’s ok. Good night, Onni. See you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”  
And he hangs up.

With a heavy sense of exhaustion, Lalli drops the phone onto the nightstand. It quickly slips off and bounces off of the book on the floor, but he doesn’t care.

“Who was that?” asks Emil, bleary and confused. 

“Onni.”

That wakes Emil up “Shit. Are we-”

“No. Relax, we’re still in the closet. My crazy old neighbour torched her house and Onni went in to check on me.”

“You- what? Old Lady Maggie?”

“Uh huh.”

“What for?”

“To get back at her kids, I guess.”

Emil’s head drops back to the pillow “What a weird way to do it. Here, come here. I’m cold. You let all the warmth out when you got up.”

Lalli obliges. He threads an arm around Emil’s shoulder and makes him share the pillow, so that their noses are almost touching.

Gay agenda. Whatever that means, if it lets Lalli be this close to a person he genuinely loves, then he’s happy to serve it.  
It might be a while before he gets around to telling his family that, but they probably won’t even care when he does.

Hopefully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers: they don't care.  
> I'm betting Onni had a boyfriend when he was in college that he genuinely thought about marrying. But it came about that said boyfriend had really cold feet he put all over Onni when they shared a bed and was a serial cheater, so Onni had to kick his ass to the curb. Something like that.


	7. 8: Innocence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir is having some trouble with the wild-life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A whole host of animals which have no business in Scandinavia are going to show up for this one.  
> Case in point? Our friend, the moose

Reynir takes a long time to notice his little problem after his first foray into the Silent World. 

There were bigger problems than said problem, noticing it or gathering the courage to address it, what, with having to go back home and change his life entirely and all that. He entered training at the academy in Iceland, against the wishes of his beloved parents, who wanted to build a tower and lock him in it for the rest of his life after what he did to their hearts, running away like that.  
As Onni had guessed in that first winter, Reynir was an enormously talented and powerful mage. Once he had the guidance he so desperately needed, he was doing excellently.

Making spells left, right and centre. Conjuring himself up a protective circle whenever he wanted- he got so good at this, thanks to devoted practice, he would even throw up a circle if there was a spider in his room which he didn’t want to take care of. For obvious reasons, he was of great interest to his teachers and a few vague, sinister authorities that hovered above him.  
They accelerated his training. In two years, Reynir was finished with what should have been a five-year programme and found himself again comfortably sandwiched under the wing of Sigrun Eide.

This time, he spoke Norwegian. It was not fluent by the time he arrived to her Norwegian outfit early in Year 93, but after the first week he at least knew his way around curses pretty well.  
And it was nice to be able to understand, at last, what she and Emil were saying. Emil’s accent was actually easier for him to understand than the Norwegian one, and since Emil was the only other foreigner on the team when Reynir arrived, they spent a lot of time together in the first few weeks before troll hunting season kicked off in earnest.

Because of the time they were spending in close quarters, it is Emil who notices the problem first.   
They are patrolling along the security fence of the hunters’ compound in Dalsnes, which is pretty much the only significant modern touch to the compound, as the rest looks like it’s been shipped straight out of medieval Norway, when Emil brings it up.  
Reynir is in the middle of an anecdote about his short time at the academy when a hawk flies low over the fence and lands gently on his shoulder. On instinct, Emil recoils and examines the bird for signs of the Rash.

“It’s alright,” assures Reynir “This little lady is perfectly healthy.”

“Doesn’t that hurt? It must be crushing your shoulder.”

Reynir shrugs, causing the hawk to bob up and down. It bears this disturbance perfectly normally, but stares at Emil with wild, cold eyes. It seems to be imagining the taste of Swedish liver.

“Reynir, have you ever noticed this stuff happens a lot with you?”

“What?” asks Reynir innocently.

“Birds landing on you.”

“Oh. It happened all the time at the academy in Iceland. I figure I must still smell like the academy, you know? All that magical energy and spiritual power attracts all kinds of animals.”

Emil nods “Yes, I know. I’ve seen Lalli attracting bunnies and deer. But this is…this is just kind of on a different level. And a little bit scary.”

He frowns “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t noticed?”

Emil points beyond the fence, to the tree-line. In anticipation of seeing a troll preparing to charge them, Reynir draws his rifle. The hawk bobs up and down on his shoulder, cemented in place and still fixing the filthiest stare on Emil.  
When Reynir sees what has got Emil so unnerved, he pauses. Lowers his rifle and stares in a mixture of pleasant surprise and disbelief.

“Awww! Fawns! They usually don’t get this close to troll-infested territory.”

“They don’t ever get this close,” corrects Emil “I think you may be attracting them. Remember last solstice? You used your break to come and see us in Mora? You remember how you had about five doves land on you when me and you and Tuuri were walking in the town? I don’t even know if Sweden has doves.”

Two fawns peer out of the tree-line with wide, fascinated eyes. They are clearly staring at Reynir. Just to make certain, he steps to the left, then to the right. Their eyes follow him determinedly.

“This…this isn’t weird to you at all?”

“Not really, no. I’m a mage, Emil. I kind of have to expect funny stuff like…like attracting deer and my hawky friend here to happen to me every now and then.”

 

Next person to bring it up is Sigrun.

They’re on a kind of two-man hunting mission; a lower effort one that only really requires an experienced hunter and a capable mage, which they most definitely are. Sigrun leads the way into the forest; they are heading into a segment considered to be quite safe compared to the rest of the forest, in large part due to Sigrun’s efforts.  
She is fond of telling the story; back when she was a young, angry, pig-tailed thing, she decided she was done with being the daughter of two generals. If she was going to have a reputation, then, by Tyr, she was going to forge it with her own two hands!

And so she set off into the coldest winter on record with fur coat, a knife, a rifle and a few bullets, some dried fruit and a hairbrush so her pigtails wouldn’t become a miserable, curled mess while she lived in the forest. For five months, she drank melted snow, ate from the forest and killed any troll dumb enough to cross her path. This included Giants.  
Word must have spread around the troll community; by the fifth month, she wasn’t getting attacked daily any longer. Or weekly. In fact, upon seeing her, trolls were liable to turn away and lumber off as fast as they could. Never fast enough to dodge Sigrun, of course.

When she returned, her presence lingered in this particular section of the forest. No trolls come here. Ever. 

Sigrun stretches her back, then points to a small cave under a snowy knoll to their left “I lived there alone for a little while. Two months in, an Arctic Fox came and lived with me. Best roommate I ever had.”

Reynir nods. He has heard this story before, but likes to pretend he hasn’t so Sigrun will tell the story again “What was that like?”

“Uh, fox-ish? I don’t know. It was just like if you went home for a nap on your couch, except your couch was a mossy hole in the ground and you had to spoon with an Artic Fox. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t pleasant either. They run, foxes, when they dream, and my fox was always dreaming. Scratched the hell out of me.”

They have come down to this part of the forest to look around for signs of trolls. Generally, it is taken as a given that there will be no trolls in this area, nor malignant spirits; Sigrun apparently scared those off too, during her five months in the cave.   
In a few months, this part of the forest is going to be developed a little bit. Wildlife has begun to return to the area as it is cleansed by the nearby Dalsnes outfit. Because of this, some of the Council’s biologists are going to come out and see what species might have survived the Rash, other than the typical elk, deer and foxes and hares. Some kind of migration was predicted because weird species, clumsily and hastily adapted for the cold weather, were showing up in Sweden- like some kind of panda bear with a thicker coat, and a crocodile that had as much blubber as a seal.

Reynir doesn’t know what they think they’re going to find out here, but he and Sigrun are supposed to be checking it out now to make sure it’s safe for the biologists to look.

But Sigrun isn’t looking around at the woods. She’s just staring at him, with a mixture of fondness and amazement on her face.  
“There you go again.”

“What?”

She points to his boots.   
Reynir looks down and finds that somehow, a small hare has crawled on top of his feet and planted itself firmly between his boots without his noticing.

“Oh. Huh. Emil’s right.”

“What did Emil say?”

“That I attract an abnormal amount of animals. Even for a mage.”

Sigrun cocks an eyebrow “What, you hadn’t noticed that?”

He grows embarrassed “Um, no. No I thought it was normal.”

“Kid, you got a rabbit sitting on your shoes. That stuff doesn’t even happen to normal mages like Lalli- well, he’s not a normal mage, but you know what I mean.”

Now, she starts her work. Of course she would start walking off when Reynir has something small and heart-meltingly adorable sitting on his feet. He shakes the rabbit carefully from his shoes and catches up quickly, throwing a soft ‘I’m sorry!’ over his shoulder at the disgruntled animal.  
They take what looks like a game trail, probably made by deer or elk. That, in itself, is pretty much an indication there’s nothing around to pose a threat.

He falls in step with Sigrun “Is it a problem?”

She shrugs “I guess it could be. Say, if you start attracting Rash-sick animals. Remember Emil’s dog? What did he call that thing…something like Cthulu? Imagine if a bunch of those bastards decide they’d like to get in your personal space.”

She takes a look at his face and laughs, slapping him on the shoulder.

“Alright, kid, maybe don’t imagine it.”

At that moment, as if summoned, there is a crackle of the underbrush behind them and some looming shadow falls over them. Sigrun pushes Reynir behind her and draws her rifle. Then stops and gapes.

“Is that a fucking moose?” she whispers, hesitant of shouting and spooking the massive animal now blocking the game trail.

“What’s a moose?” asks Reynir, whose knowledge of the diversity of animals pretty much begins and ends with sheep and foxes.

“That,” she nods towards the huge, deer-like animal in front of them “That’s a moose.”

The moose takes a fearless step forward. It has no fear of Sigrun or her gun. And, sensing this, Sigrun packs away her rifle. Sure, the thing is big enough that it could crack open their skulls with a single kick if it felt like it.  
But the moose is not interested in splitting skulls today. Instead, it wanders over to Reynir, again, fearlessly past Sigrun, and pops its massive face in Reynir’s face.

Reynir swallows audibly. He reaches up and pats the moose’s oddly shaped snout “Hello there. So…so you’re not normally in these parts are you, Mr Moose? How do you like Norway?”

 

Mikkel brings it up the very next day.  
He has been within arm’s reach for most of Reynir’s stay on the base, and, as usual, happy to serve as Reynir’s pseudo-older-bro in times of confusion and distress. Yesterday, he and Sigrun had to finish their survey of the area with the affectionate moose following closely in Reynir’s footsteps. The fact that they did not chase away the moose seemed to give the rest of the forest permission to come and see Reynir.

By the time they left the forest, Reynir had to wave goodbye to three fawns (the two from yesterday brought a friend), a small mob of rabbits, a few birds which he did not know how to identify, the moose and an exceptionally long ferret.   
He is pretty sure neither of the last two are supposed to be native to Norway, but was hesitant to ask Sigrun; she was very freaked out. The great deal that it takes to freak her out had been delivered, with bonuses, so all she wanted to do was get back to the relative safety and sanity of the base and behind the fence where all but the flying animals could not follow.

Sigrun suggested Reynir keep it a secret or not mention it until they had a clearer explanation as to why the fauna of the world is determined to stalk him and gain his affections.  
Mikkel, however, has obviously not received this order. The next day, while they are taking inventory of rifles and ammo in the stock room, Mikkel says

“Are you aware that you attract animals like a magnet?”

Reynir straightens up from the box of shells he was counting “Thirty-nine. What?”

Mikkel points over Reynir’s shoulder at the window “That. I have never seen anything like that before.”

Turning, Reynir sees an owl has pressed its face to the window. A Great Snowy Owl, by the looks of its face-shape. The eyes are most definitely trained on Reynir. Its claws must be sunk into the windowsill to keep it upright.

“Oh. Yes. I know I do that…apparently. Um, thirty-nine.”

“Excellent. What calibre is that?”

“I don’t know? It’s big.”

“Thank you- oh, look, there’s another one.”

He turns again to find a large, sleek raven has joined the owl in the windowsill.

Reynir swallows, hard “Don’t owls and ravens attack each other, most of the time?”

“Allegedly.”

“So…huh. Um, Mikkel, do you think it’s weird that I do this? I mean, attract things? Animals and stuff?”

Mikkel makes a note on his clipboard “Honestly? I think it’s a testament to your kindness. You may not have noticed this about yourself Reynir, but you are an exceptionally sweet person. And with your substantial magical aura, I’m sure it’s much easier for animals to notice that than with other people.”

Reynir is so glad he didn’t say ‘normal people’ he wants to hug him. But he won’t- he’s never hugged Mikkel. It’s kind of just one of those things you don’t do, like punching a bear in the snout or taking candy from a baby. Mikkel wouldn’t appreciate it if he did, either.

“Thanks, Mikkel.”

Mikkel looks up and over his shoulder again. He frowns slightly “That’s not to say it isn’t a weird thing to have going for you.”

There is now a small flock of sparrows gathered on the heads and shoulders of the raven and owl. All of the birds are staring intently at Reynir. They decided Mikkel should open the window and shoo the birds away before Reynir attempted to leave the storerooms.

 

In a surprising twist of fate and fortune, when the biologists arrive a few weeks later, coinciding exactly with the troll-hunting season’s commencement, Tuuri and Lalli come with them.  
Apparently Mikkel knew from the start that they would be coming, but did not want to share that information with the other three, in case something happened to prevent them and they were disappointed. Sigrun threatens affectionately to stick him back on the munity-risk list when Tuuri and Lalli show up unexpectedly, attached to the biologists’ entourage. 

Tuuri seems to enjoy surprising them. She strolls up from the back of the group as the biologists mingle with the Cleansers, introducing themselves, and salutes Mikkel, addressing him as “Deputy Madsen! It’s good to see you again, sir.”

Then they both crack up and slap each other on the shoulder, and, wonders of wonders, exchange a quick hug. Lalli gets one too, because he can’t get away from Mikkel fast enough.

Reynir is overjoyed to see his friends, of course. It really feels like they’re back in the tank, especially because Kitty has just finished her training as a hunter/ Cleansers’ cat, and is now able to go out on missions in proper.  
The old team is all back together professionally, for the first time since their winter trip ended two years ago. It feels good.

And it’s bloody embarrassing too, because Lalli is so amused by Reynir’s sudden magnetism to the animal world.  
The first night after the biologists arrive, another crowd of birds lines up on the windowsill to stare at Reynir. When he retires to the dorms, the birds fly overhead and gather on the roof of the dorms. Long into the night, soldiers are standing outside laughing drunkenly, trying to coax down one of the parliament of owls with scraps of sausage. 

The second day, Reynir is helping the biologists set up their base of operations. He and Lalli are placing a protective circle around the area, so they will at least have a warning if some enterprising troll does decide to make a snack of them, when the moose wanders out of the woods again.

Lalli taps him on the arm “Is that your moose?”

“No!”

“Sigrun said you have a moose.”

“Sigrun was just kidding.”

“Here it comes.”

The moose comes over to them, sniffs Lalli curiously, then licks Reynir upside the head. Then, three more moose come out of the woods- two smaller moose, and one that looks like it might be the first moose’s significant other? Do moose even mate for life?  
Lalli calls one of the biologists over to have a look, and she just about messes herself with excitement. For the rest of the afternoon, Reynir is made to sit still and keep the moose calm and interested while the biologists circle him, making notes and taking measurements, swapping theories as to how the moose got there.

When he gets up to return to the base, the moose follow him diligently until they arrive at the edge of the tree-line. Reynir sighs with relief and makes a break for the security fence. Hearing something breathing heavily with the effort of catching him, he turns, thinking Lalli might be coming after him.  
The scream he produces when he sees the Grey Wolf hot on his heels is so shrill it summons half of the base to the security fence, armed and ready for the fight.

Instead, they get to watch Reynir running in circles while a wolf the size of a small horse chases him, yipping joyfully at the wonder of their game. Within five minutes, the biologists have joined the end of the merry chase to take some more of their infernal measurements.

Emil waves Lalli over. Through the security fence, they exchange a few theories about why Reynir is so attractive to animals right now.

“I blame his powers.” says Lalli “They won’t stop raving about how Reynir is one of the strongest Icelandic mages of this generation. Well, this is what he gets for being so powerful.”

“Ah, don’t be such a sour-puss. Be happy for him.”

“I’m worried for him. That’s a wolf trying to give him a kiss, right there.”

“Reynir’s got it under control.”

Suddenly, the wolf darts in front of Reynir. It leans down on its front paws and wags its tail, asking to play. Reynir screams and makes a break for it in the opposite direction, but the wolf quickly heads him off. Then they are going around in circles again.

“Sure he does.” says Lalli.

Emil shrugs “Even if this doesn’t end very well, I’m sure Reynir won’t get hurt. Look at that wolf. It’s having the time of its life. Nothing will hurt Reynir. He’s far too innocent for that.”


	8. 2: Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri/ Reynir  
> Kind of   
> (Don't have a melt-down just yet, Kirlaly)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for extremely, very, almost invisible references to sexy times  
> Also, veiled reference to groping. (Don't worry, Tuuri gets her revenge)

Tuuri has her first kiss at twelve.

It is quite an experience. An underwhelming one, at that, which leaves her wondering why adults and teenagers alike rave about it . Kissing, that is, and the people you kiss. Boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives.  
After that kiss, Tuuri is quite ready to give up on the concept of love, and all of the partners it leads to entirely. If she had to go through a similarly wet, sloppy experience every single time she wanted to show affection to her significant other, then what was the point? Why should she go out of her way to fall in love if it was just going to culminate in such an unpleasant experience?

Her name is Malin and she plainly has no idea what she is doing.  
She’s Swedish. The children of some dignitary visiting Keuruu, to whom Tuuri was assigned to keep her entertained and out of trouble. Tuuri liked her from the moment she saw her. Malin is very pretty, with dark eyes, dark hair, and darker skin, which is not something Tuuri has seen much of in Keuruu. 

Tuuri quickly developed a crush on her. She is wise enough to know that she is not going to marry Malin when she grows up. This is just a childhood crush she can look back on fondly, later, when she’s a big lady, and maybe long for an innocent, shy week like this one was again? Onni always talks about wishing he could be innocent again, though Tuuri thinks this has more to do with being innocent of how damned hard it is to raise two kids than being in love.

Tuuri doubts Onni has ever spent a week thinking about how nice a girl’s hair can look in the sun, and how her hair looks like the golden, liquidy stuff that comes off burnt chocolate, and how she smells a little bit like that stuff too. He has probably never been lead away from some grown-ups at the last minute, behind a small shed where the guns are kept, and been given a kiss.  
Or at least, licked upside the cheek and told he was very pretty.

Malin’s kiss is supposed to be a goodbye kiss. Tuuri is glad. She doesn’t think she can look at Malin again, after such a weirdly bad kiss.  
It was not like the kisses she thinks of as the proper one- with lips actually connecting and tongues not coming out to lick the other party’s cheek. Tuuri still has no idea why Malin did that. Maybe it’s a Swedish custom she is unaware of?

Either way, it’s over now. She has waved Malin and her parents and their whole entourage off, and it is not without a prickle of sadness.  
Was Malin her girlfriend? Maybe. Tuuri wouldn’t know. She has never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend before, and she has never seen Onni with one either. Lalli has just turned ten. He won’t know what to tell her if she asks him if Malin was her girlfriend. The way he acts around people, he’s probably never going to get a boyfriend or a girlfriend, let alone a husband or a wife.

Tuuri walks back to her family’s barrack, wiping a few tears on the way back. She throws the door open and finds Onni on his belly on the floor, trying to coax Lalli out from under the bed.

“…it’s just a vitamin, it won’t make you sick.”

“I’m not taking it.”

“Yes you are,” growls Onni, in the growl he uses when he’s trying to sound mad and dangerous, but is really just tired “The sooner you come out of there and do as you’re told, the sooner you can go back outside and play.”

“I wasn’t playing.”

“What were you doing?” he sounds a little concerned now.

“I was doing mage stuff.”

“Lalli, were you trying to manifest your luonto again? You could kill yourself doing that!”

Tuuri kicks the doorframe. She wants to be noticed, but she doesn’t want to be noticed trying to get noticed. The noise sounds accidental, like she bumped the door on her way in. She closes it behind her, as Onni looks over his shoulder at her. Lalli’s keen grey eyes peer at her out from under the bed.

“Tuuri, are you crying?” asks Onni hesitantly.

She shakes her head, opening her mouth to say the wind is strong and hurt her eyes. Instead, she bursts into loud sobs.

The sobs of a first, brief love lost, and a first kiss squandered on a very pretty, chocolate smelling girl who thought kisses were delivered on the cheek with a tongue.

 

Tuuri gets her first boyfriend at the age of fourteen.

He is loud, obnoxious and altogether annoying, and Tuuri does not remember how they got together in the first place.  
The month they spent as a couple is not worth mentioning.

 

Tuuri has her first brush with actual love at seventeen, and also, her first brush with death.

Onni told her to stay away from him, the first day she came home talking about how cute he was and how nice he was to her. She accuses him of wanting her to be like Lalli.

“What, afraid of people and socialising? No! I want you to be a swanning, social butterfly, Tuuri! As far as I’m concerned, you can have a hundred boyfriends! Just not that guy!”

“You just want me to spend all my time in the forest, talking to the animals and casting spells and being a freak like you two!”

At that moment, Lalli came in, just in time to hear his cousin calling him a freak. He turns around and goes back out the door. Tuuri interprets this as hurt feelings and gives chase to apologise. Lalli sees her coming after him and figures whatever righteous anger his cousins were exchanging when he came in is about to be shared with him.  
He goes up a tree. Tuuri follows.

Tuuri’s new boyfriend watches in the crowd that gathers, as Tuuri struggles to peel Lalli from the tree trunk. At one point, their eyes catch each other’s through the screen of leaves. He smiles at her. Tuuri’s insides turn to a gooey mush. She smiles back quite prettily, then wrenches Lalli from the trunk with a final supreme effort and flings him over her shoulder.

“You’re a strong girl,” observes the new boyfriend, once she has put her cousin on the ground wrapped an arm around his shoulder to prevent future escapes “I like that. Strong girls.”

She feels her throat growing hot with a blush “Oh, yeah? I like being a strong girl.”

Lalli makes a gurgling noise at the back of his throat. Whether this is because of clumsy flirting being exchanged over his head, or the headlock Tuuri has him in, she doesn’t care.

“You’re gonna be a skald, right? Skalds have to be strong.” he continues.

Lalli bites Tuuri’s arm gently, attempting to let her know his patience is at an end. She ignores him.

“Yeah, yeah we do. I think I’ll do well with it. The job, I mean.”

Lalli is left with no choice but to go limp like a ragdoll. His sudden, drastic increase in weight drags Tuuri to the floor. They land in a tangle of limbs and a poof of snow.  
The new boyfriend takes this as his cue to scoot off and let the family sort out their problems.

“Why,” hisses Tuuri “Why do you have to embarrass me in front of everyone?”

“You were chasing me. Like an axe murderer.”

Disgusted, she lets him go, resolving not to talk to him for a little while. That will give him a chance to think about what he’s done.  
She forgets all about apologising.

Tuuri and the new boyfriend do well for the next month, until the new boyfriend’s interests take a slightly more intimate turn. One night, while her family are doing something weird and mage-y in the woods, he suggests an activity which they have not tried before.  
Tuuri says she doesn’t think she is ready. The new boyfriend insists she is. Tuuri says she is not. The new boyfriend is insistent. 

Tuuri is more insistent and throws him out of her barrack by the collar. She spits after him and advises him to start respecting women a little more, or the next time he gets thrown off something it’s going to be a cliff, rather than her short front steps.  
Then she slams the door and cries until she is dehydrated. When they return from their mage business, her cousin and brother- her boys- bring endless glasses of water and listen to her doubts that anything like real love exists.

 

At the age of twenty-one, Tuuri is a fully grown woman.

She has experienced the activity the long-ago boyfriend was so interested in (now referred to as ‘Mr Bust-grabber’ whenever she recounts the story, which makes Onni angry and Lalli uncomfortable) and had a few other boyfriends, and one other girlfriend. She hasn’t seen Malin again so far, but spends some of her free time, bored stiff in the office, wondering what kind of awkward beauty her childhood girlfriend might have grown into.

When the opportunity comes along to get the Hel out of her boring office job, Tuuri jumps at the opportunity and brings her cousin with her.

There, she meets a boy. A man, technically. He has long hair and longer legs, and keeps his arms rigid at his sides when he turns in the narrow confines of the tank. In the fresh air, he is not afraid of knocking anything over with his impressively long limbs. He looks kind of like an elf from the legends when he runs through the snow- one Freja might have taken an interest in, in fact.

Tuuri likes his smile. She likes his freckles. She likes the fact that he cannot speak a word of any of the other three or four languages spoken in the tank, but remains optimistic about getting people to understand what he’s saying when he talks, anyway.  
She likes that he’s kind without a motive, other than to be kind. She likes that he never sits too close or asks her personal questions. She likes that he’s annoyingly eager to help.

Tuuri wouldn’t go as far to say she likes everything about him, but she hasn’t got very many complaints.  
If by the end of this winter’s trip, she ends up with a new boyfriend, she is definitely more hopeful for the relationship that may result. Tuuri doubts very much she would ever end up sticking him with a nickname.

If she does decide to pursue him, which is not to say that she has thought about it long and hard, yet, then Tuuri doubts she will ever have to call him anything but his name.

Reynir.


	9. 3: Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore, gore, fabulous gore. Warning, that is. A gore warning

Sigrun wakes Mikkel up sometime past midnight with a gentle nudge in the ribs. 

He sits up immediately. In his half-asleep state, his fogged brain interprets the foot in his ribs as his sister’s. For a few very confused seconds, Mikkel is a teenager again, getting kicked awake by the sister with which he shared a room for nineteen years (until he moved out for work), and collecting the energy to get up and attend to his numerous chores.  
Then it clicks in his head that none of his three sisters have red hair. Definitely not the sister that would have kicked him- they’re twins, and they both came out blonde as eggs yolks.

Mikkel collects himself “What is it?”

Sigrun gestures for him to shush and hisses “Don’t wake up the kids.”

He looks around him at the sleepers. Lalli lies where he was left, looking like one of those Egyptian mummy things. Tuuri’s drooling gently on her pillow. Reynir is face-planted into his bedding with an arm flung out sideways over the cat, and has a knee crooked up at angle and into Emil’s side.   
Mikkel doubts very much there is a danger of rousing any of these people before dawn hits the horizon.

“What is it?” he repeats.  
It could be any number of terrible things and terrible deaths scratching at the door to get in. Or it could be that Sigrun accidentally locked the bathroom from the outside again, and needs his lock-picking expertise to open it before she has to go in the snow.

“Something weird.”

Well that explains it.

“I need to get dressed?”

“You need to get dressed.”  
Sigrun is already kitted out to go hunt something down. Her rifle is slung over her back, with the weird addition of a medical kit. He has no idea whatsoever why she thinks she needs to carry that- she hasn’t before. This little detail is enough to get Mikkel out of bed without further questions.

He dresses quickly and quietly, and takes his rifle too from the small armoury in the closet. All of the other times he has opened this closet, it has been to get a broom.

Sigrun waits with unusual patience for him to get ready before she pulls the door open. Barely. Just open enough to slide her slim self out and let in a small draft. Mikkel has to open the door a little bit wider, since Sigrun is basically two-dimensional when compared to his own dimensions. He closes the door silently and trudges after Sigrun, who is standing stock-still in the snow about fifteen metres away.

“What is it?” he cannot pretend he is not irritated at being dragged out of bed at this grey hour.

“You see it?”

Immediately, he thinks of trolls. Secondly, he thinks of spirits, of the kind that caught them yesterday and dragged them into unconsciousness. There was something a little deeper there than unconsciousness, wasn’t there? He has not yet had the time nor the courage to corroborate with Sigrun, but Mikkel is pretty sure they were being dragged into something like Hel’s realm when those spirits got into them.  
Now is not the time to address that, though. There are clearly more urgent matters at hand.

“What am I looking at?”

“That,” says Sigrun, pointing, which doesn’t make anything clearer.

“Huh?”

Sighing, she points again “There! Right there! It’s flaring up. Look, you see the light?”

Mikkel squints, and he sees what Sigrun has been talking about.   
He stares at the flicker of light among the distant trees for a full minute before the implications of what they are seeing hits him. His heart crawls into his mouth.

“This part of the world is abandoned, isn’t it?”

“Allegedly.”

They have lowered their voices. For some reason, it feels appropriate.

Sigrun is the first to recover her voice “It’s not a Cleansing outfit. They would never come this far out. We’re the first people to come this far out.”

Mikkel shrugs “It may be a loner. A hermit of some sort, who broke away from the Known World?”

Sigrun does this scathingly sarcastic thing with her eyebrows “Really?”

“If you’re trying to suggest we’re looking at a whole other civilization out there,” he pauses to add his own eyebrow gesture, which he hopes is just as devastating “Don’t you think we would have stumbled across some sign of life by now?”

“What do you call that?”

“A mysterious light. There are such a thing as phosphorescent trolls.”

Even as he says it, Mikkel knows he is wrong. That light is definitely the light of a fire; a campfire at that, made to keep a human or a group of humans warm in the harsh winter.   
He is just so thrilled by the chance to speak to Sigrun, to make a decision with her without being talked over and drowned out, he cannot bring himself not to use the opportunity to disagree.

Sigrun’s eyebrows make an even more dramatic gesture “Really?”

“Alright,” he concedes “Alright, you’re right. It’s a campfire. What do you want to do about it? We can’t leave the kids- the others, pardon me, undefended. Especially with Lalli out of commission.”

Sigrun furrows her brow. She has not yet unknitted her eyebrows from their dramatic position, so the effect is startling. She looks as if she is about to devour an infant, or at least considering it very seriously.  
Finally, she says “Emil is here.”

To Mikkel that’s a little bit like saying ‘the cat is here’.  
Yes, in theory that cat is capable of defending the crew. But in practice the cat is more likely to fluff up its commendable fur at the troll and scramble out of the way as fast as its dainty paws can carry it.

But the alternative involves one of them wandering off into the woods, in the dead of night, in order to investigate light of an unknown source. A human source, in all likelihood.  
His parents’ and older siblings were pretty lax when it came to drilling stranger-danger into him; in his childhood, people were more concerned with making it to the next day, healthy, fed, without a troll breaking down their door for their children’s marrow to worry about kidnapping the neighbours’ kids.

Actually, from what he knows of the social circumstances of the old world, the Known World seems a lot safer and more trusting.

But these people are probably not from the Known World, as it is currently known. This is Copenhagen, and it is owned by the dead. They are probably not Danish either- or if they are, then they are living in another country. When Mikkels’ great great grandfather (who had somehow managed to cling stubbornly on to life until Mikkel and his twin were in their late teens) used to rave about the Jamaicans. 

The Jamaicans shut their borders, he’d say. The Jamaicans are smart, he’d say, and they’ll be along any day to save us from this mess.  
Towards the end of his life, he took to poking his head out of an upper window and shouting down to passers-by, asking if they had seen any Jamaicans.

Mikkel doubts very much that these people have arrived- the belated Jamaican cavalry, coming to rescue their Scandinavian brethren from the clutches of the Rash. If it is indeed the Jamaicans, he intends to punch their leader in the ribs and tell them they came fifteen years too late for the one, crazy old coot who really believed in them.

“What did you just mutter?” asks Sigrun “What’s Jamaica got to do with anything?”

“Nothing.” he says quickly.

He’s impressed Sigrun even knows what Jamaica is. Perhaps she really did spend a few years in a classroom, rather than running around with a knife in her teeth and blood-lust in her eyes for her entire childhood, as Mikkel imagines she did.

After a quick discussion, it is decided they should both go. Sending just one would most likely result in a fatality. Either the trolls will get them, one of them will fall into a snow-well and suffocate, or the strangers around the distant, flickering firelight will kill them. This is Sigrun’s reasoning, anyway, and Mikkel knows her well enough by now to know when she makes a choice which she absolutely cannot be talked down from.

So they set off. It is not an easy trip, wading through deep snow on uncertain footing. The light, as well, is provided only by a moon which keeps darting underneath the clouds, usually when they need it the most to watch for sudden drops on slopes, or to confirm that a flicker of movement one of them saw was a trick of the light rather than a hungry troll.

“They’re probably not hunters.” says Sigrun after a few long moments of walking “If they were hunters, they would know not to light the damned fire in the first place. Trolls are attracted to fire like moths and flames.”

She does not need to tell him this. Mikkel knows. Mikkel has been on his fair share of battlefields before.  
“You don’t suppose they’re some kind of Cleansing outfit? They may be using the fire to attract some targets.”

“No,” says Sigrun “We would have heard something gurgling and dying by now, if they were cleansers. Unless we’re the targets they want to attract.”

Surprisingly, Mikkel is not afraid “They’ll get a little more than they bargained for with you, if that is true.”

Sigrun’s deep laugh sounds from the dark “Thanks. You got it in you to smash a few heads together, if we do have to fight?”

“Of course. I have seven siblings.”

“So you know your way around fights.” she surmises “I’m an only child. Honestly, I think Mom and Dad were afraid of having kids in case they turned out wimpy. Their first one, me, was such a nutcase they figured they’d already produced the best possible result the two of them could make together.”

Her ruminations are cut short by the short, unmistakable shot of a gun. Both of them freeze in the dark. For a long moment, the woods are silent- silent of human noises, that is, but there is the whisper of birds taking flight all over the forest, and the metallic echo of the gunshot bouncing between tree-trunks.  
It turns Mikkel’s stomach. 

“Let’s hope that’s a cooking fire.” whispers Sigrun.

He can tell she already knows it is not. In the same way he knows that nearing fire is not for cooking, and that gunshot just now fading into silence was aimed at a deer. Or a troll.

Another five shots come in rapid succession. Finally, someone screams. It is a loud, long, heart-wrenching scream that reminds Mikkel of his father.  
Specifically, of the only mistake he ever witnessed his father make on the farm. He was butchering a calf. At the same time, he was screaming at Mikkel’s twin sister to do a chore the right way, and did not really look before he chopped. The axe slammed into the calf’s shoulder and tore the limb right off. It made that noise that Mikkel is hearing right now, and it went on making that noise as Mikkel, then ten years old, passed out completely from the shock of it.

This time, he does not pass out. He does not even go weak at the knees. Working as a medic makes one accustomed to noises like this, and he has yet to decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

Sigrun does not speak until the last trace of the echo of the scream has faded “Do you want to keep going?”

“Of course.”  
The fire is still burning. The light persists. So, it stands to reason, someone might persist at the campfire as well.

They arrive at the campfire less than ten minutes after the scream dwindled into silence. The first thing Mikkel notices is the smell of blood; blood is everywhere. None of it is animal.  
In the conventional sense, anyway.

Three figures lay around the fire, which roars on higher and higher, unaware or uncaring of the carnage around it. 

The figure nearest to them is a young boy, wrapped in a thick, winter coat. The coat is punctured by two bullet holes, from which blood still pours at a steady rate. You would think that the wounds would have stopped flowing so after ten minutes of death.  
The boy must have only just died. His eyes are still open and not clogged with snowflakes which would have landed in them if he had been staring glassy-eyed at the sky for a while.

Sigrun stoops over this boy, putting two fingers to his neck. Rather redundantly, Mikkel thinks. He is quite obviously dead.

“Still warm,” she says “He’s just gone.”

She passes a hand over his eyes. When she raises her hand, the eyes are closed. A snowflake settles on an eyelash and begins to melt in the corpse’s residual heat.

The second figure is a woman’s. She lays flung out on her back, a little ways away from the fire and the boy. Judging from her position and the single, wide bullet-hole in her back, she was shot as she tried to run.  
Her blood has long since begun to freeze in the snow.

Lastly is another woman. She sits upright with her back to a tree. Her gender is only identifiable by the swell of breasts underneath her thick coat. Her head has been blown of completely. The long barrel of a rifle is nestled in her cleavage. It would be almost comical if it weren’t for the spatter of gore on the tree behind her. 

The boy bears a passing resemblance to one of Mikkel’s younger brothers. This boy’s hair is a bird wing’s black instead of blond, his eyes were green instead of brown, and his cheekbones are far more defined than his brother’s- almost like a grown man’s.  
The boy really doesn’t look anything like Mikkel’s younger brother.

“They’re not dressed like us.” he observes.

He can think of nothing better to say. 

They don’t look like them either. Not like any white or black or brown or any of those shades and races in between that Mikkel has ever seen before.  
From of the races currently surviving in Scandinavia, Mikkel can guess they are not Syrian or Chinese or Chinese Malaysian or Navajo or Turkish or Jordanian or Japanese or Sudanese or Turkish or Kurdish or Somalian. Neither are they white or black Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, British or Finnish. They are not Sami either.

He has no idea what race they might be. Whatever it is, it is something they all have in common. But they do not look as if they are related to each other.

The features have no commons train of family resemblance. The two women have brown hair, but curled in different ways. The boy’s nose is hooked, and the two women have straight and flat noses respectively.

They are just a group of strangers, thrown together with a rifle and a camp-fire to share.  
It is not easy to tell what turned them on each other. If it was willing deaths the other two went to, leaving their final companion to finish herself off. If it was two murders and a suicide.

There is just no way to tell.

“We should go.” says Sigrun.

Mikkel nods.

“I don’t see any reason to go looking for,” she gestures around them “More of these guys. If they just murder each other at random, or whatever this is…I don’t know. Our place is pretty safe, you know? People are good to each other. I’m not prepared to bring back a bunch of people who might go nuts on the Known World and start shooting each other.”

“You don’t have to justify it to me.”

They are obviously thinking the exact same thing.

Though they have decided not to look further, to just get and go, they cannot seem to move. Both of them are rooted to the spot by some mysterious force, keeping them from returning to the tank, where the clothes are familiar and there is no malice. 

Mikkel cannot get over how much the boy looks like his younger brother, while simultaneously looking nothing like him at all.

“Should we bury them?” asks Mikkel at length.

Sigrun shakes her head “Leave them for the wolves.”

She turns and melts back into the shadows of the forest. Mikkel follows.  
Not a word is spoken between them.

But, somewhere in the near-distance, something lets out a strained, painful howl. Several more come in response and seem to converge.  
To converge on the light. The campfire and its dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know we haven't seen anything in the comics to indicate there are any of these cultures or ethnicities surviving in the Known World. I just wanted to have a little bit of fun with who I think could have and might have survived.  
> Syrians, because the Rash probably happened a little bit after the refugee crisis. Chinese Malaysian because every Danish person I know is also by some weird coincidence Chinese Malaysian.  
> Navajo because I lived in Arizona a way, way long time ago and I thought 'hey, why not?'


	10. 34: Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun vs the sky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gave a lot of thought to this one.  
> Should I discuss constellations? How much clearer the night sky is with the pollution of the old world melted? Should I do star-gazing and little, intimate moments between the crew members while the vast universe pinwheels over their head?
> 
> Then an insidious little voice at the back of my mind whispers "Sigrun fights the sky. And she wins."
> 
> Thusly the prompt was filled.

Out of all the ways Sigrun guessed she might die, she never thought the sky itself would turn against her.

Come on. The sky? What’s the sky gonna do to her? Little bit of thunder. Little bit of lightning. Maybe some hail or a tornado if its feeling especially pissy. But the sky is no assassin- it’s not like nature, whose every organism seems designed to test the human race with annoying things like poison and rabies. It’s not like the water, which is cold enough to freeze person down to the bones and suck the life and the heat out of them. And if you aren’t frozen to death, it’s because you drowned too fast for that death.

The sky is just kind of a big hug. Sigrun knows it is made of things like air and ozone and Odin, but at when you look at the shape of the sky, all curved and folded around the earth, it’s just a hug. Why would an aspect of her world which is essentially a giant hug bear her any ill will?  
Besides that, what has Sigrun ever done to earn the scorn or hatred of the sky?

She just lives under it. She doesn’t contribute any pollutants. She doesn’t scream curses aimed specifically at the sky- and if the sky has ever taken offence to any of the number of times Sigrun has turned her face skyward and shouted some well-worded abuse, it is only because the sky misinterpreted the abuse as aimed at it.

Sigrun wouldn’t cuss out the sky. It’s a nice sky. It’s a big hug.

Having said that, why the Hel is it trying to kill her?

Sigrun is just minding her own business when it happens.  
She stands a little ways away from the tank. Her arms are stretched above her head. The sounds her bones and joints make as they stretch out the cramps from sleeping are obscene, making her want to apologise to her body for what she has done to it. She spent the last night cramped up on the floor beside Reynir, who sprawls like a cat when he sleeps.  
Reynir isn’t small, either. She had to scrunch herself up underneath Mikkel’s bunk to get Reynir’s fist out of her face, his feet out of her ribs. She lay there in a stiff, kind of plank-shaped ball all night long, and had barely managed to get any sleep by the time the sun was melting the thick night off the horizon.

Normally, she has no trouble sleeping. Hunters, Norwegian hunters especially, are renowned for their ability to sleep literally anywhere. One time, she fell asleep on horseback. Another time, when she was in training to become a fully-fledge hunter, she actually fell asleep on her feet in formation. No one noticed until she toppled onto her back, snoring gently.

Last night, Sigrun had a lot of things on her mind.

So here she is, trying to stretch and flex some of that stuff off her mind. The others are around the tank, managing to be incredibly noisy as they go about their routine. How they make so much noise when two of them have little to no idea of what the others are saying, Sigrun has no idea.  
Children. Mikkel is just as guilty as the rest of him, with all of his bearish grunting as he stretches himself out.

Sigrun takes a moment to squint at him in slight wonder. Who is this weird man, that stretches like some kind of huge mountain grizzly, but walks as lightly as an old world ballerina? She would say the Danes are mysterious people, but it’s not true.  
Mikkel is just weird.

Sigrun is thinking about how damned weird Mikkel and his ballerina footsteps are when the whistling begins. At first, she writes it off as one of the myriad of annoying, musical noises Reynir makes as he goes about being Reynir. But soon the whistling has reached such a shrill, piercing pitch, she is no longer able to dismiss it. In fact, the noise doesn’t even sound organic.

Sigrun’s immediate thought is what it always is when she hears an inexplicable noise: troll. She must kill it.

Then a shadow falls over her. She looks up. And that’s when she realises the sky is trying to kill her.

Distantly, she hears Emil playing his role of Captain Obvious as faithfully as ever “Is that a falling star.”

Sigrun has about three seconds to get to cover before she is crushed by a falling star.  
She uses it well.

The others will tell her later she seemed to move about thirty metres, which would be ten per second. Sigrun is actually willing to believe this, because when she heard that big chunk of sky coming down, and saw it coming down in a furious, fiery wrath, she didn’t think. She just dove out of the way.

Impact.

It knocks over a couple of trees and buffets them all with a hot, scorching wind that tastes like stardust. The sound of a small bomb going off inside a bucket- that’s the only thing she can think to compare the way the noise just bursts out and dives down the ear-canals, like the noise’s life mission is to destroy what is left of her hearing for once and all.  
Someone screams. Going by the shrill, girlish pitch, it’s Reynir.

The smell of caramelised sap and burning wood grows thick in the air.

Slowly, Sigrun stands. She brushes the dust and stardust and pine-needles from her trousers. The ringing in her ears is immense- intolerable. She can barely manage to stay on her feet.

“Holy shit!” she shouts, just to make sure she hasn’t gone deaf.  
She hasn’t. She heard the shaky terror in her own voice pretty well.

“Odin’s ballsack!” she continues, putting her weight on the nearest and sturdiest tree-trunk available “That one almost got me! Everyone ok?”

They have all begun to pick themselves up. Tuuri helps Reynir up and pats him on the back, muttering something in Icelandic. Emil gets on his knees and coaxes Lalli out from under the tank. The Finn’s eyes are wide, like he has just seen all of the suffering and terror in the world rolled into one.  
Mikkel fishes the cat out of his coat and strokes the poor thing. Much in the same way Tuuri is talking to Reynir, he murmurs something comforting in Danish.

“What did you mean by ‘that one’?” he asks.

Sigrun doesn’t hear most of it “What?”

“I said, what did you mean by ‘that one’? Are you regularly dodging falling stars?”

The ringing in her ears softens by just a fraction- just enough to allow her to hear what he says.  
She snorts, and notes with a mild horror that her breath comes out in an ashy puff “No! But first time for everything, right? Let’s get a look at this bastard, kids. Tuuri! Is Freckles alright?”

“He’s ok, I think?”

Reynir shakes off her hand and stumbles around to the back of the tank. A moment later, there is the sound of retching.  
Sigrun wants to know what he’s puking. What has he already eaten, this early in the morning? Maybe it’s a hairball.

Sigrun staggers as smoothly as she can over to the rim of the crater the falling star has punched in the ground. For the impact it made, the rock is quite tiny. Like, not even as big as her fist.

Emil materialises at her side, a still-shaking Finn attached firmly to his “That could have killed us.”

“Sure coulda. Aren’t we lucky?”

“But…but it hit so close to us.”

“Better than it hitting us. Chill out, kid. Stuff happens in life. If it doesn’t kill you or cripple you, you dust yourself off and move on.”

She has to admit the falling star is kind of anti-climactic. Just a chunk of pitted black rock, about half the size of her fist. Nothing glowing and green at its core, like in ancient sci-fi novels. No creature of abominable horror scuttling out of the wreckage to infect or enslave them all- a bit late for that, considering what the Rash has already done.

They leave it in the crater all morning. Sigrun keeps closer to the tank and makes everyone speak loudly, so she can hear over the persistent ringing in her ear.  
When it is time to get on the road again, Sigrun tosses some snow into the crater. The snow is no longer steaming around the crater, and neither does the snow melt as soon as it touches the rock. Not this time. It has cooled.

She slides into the crater and retrieves the rock from the bottom. Then, she scrambles back up and hops into the tank as Tuuri leans on the horn.

“Alright, alright! I’m retrieving a valuable specimen, stubby!”

“If it ain’t got words on it, we’re not interested!”  
Tuuri is still a little giddy from their narrow escape.

While the tank thunders along, Sigrun sits in the back and turns the rock over in her hands.

“Think this is worth anything?”

Mikkel shrugs “Probably would have been quite a find in the old world.”

The surface of it is polished by the entry into the atmosphere. Must have been a hellish one at that. Sigrun imagines the falling star started out as big as their tank. Then it began to tumble over and over towards the earth, until the very air caught fire and began to melt the rock. It came from who knows how many hundreds of billions of trillions of kilometres away, braved a re-entry and a trial by fire, only to narrowly miss killing her.

Poor thing. 

“If they don’t want to sell it off when we get back, I’ll use it as a paper weight.”

Mikkel grunts, as if to indicate he doubts she would have any papers to pin down, let alone a desk.


	11. 50: Siblings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A quick character study of Onni, followed by a scene imagined shortly after whenever the heck it will be when Lalli gets his butt out of his bedding

Tuuri and Lalli are born on the same day.

Two years apart, of course, but it feels to Onni like the same day. One moment, he is six years old and bowled over with excitement to see his new sibling, and making his parents laugh when he scrunches his brow and says “I wanted a brother”.  
The next, he is eight years old, peering curiously into his aunt’s arms at the strangely quiet, calm baby she has brought him to stare at. Onni can tell he has gotten his brother. Again, they laugh, telling him Lalli is his cousin. They are wrong. Lalli is his intended sibling. He just knows it, and he knows he cannot explain this to his family.

So he calls him a cousin and thinks all the while ‘this is my brother’.

Tuuri grows quickly. She is forever walking, exploring, falling over and bumping her knees. Every time she gets a scratch, she licks her wound and brings it to Onni to kiss better. He never complains. She never cries, either, when she hurts herself. Even in the serious occasions, like the time she skins her knees and leaves a streak of blood inches long where she falls.  
Onni carries her back, and she is more concerned that he is crying than that her own knees are weeping what looks like pints of blood.

Lalli grows quickly too, but unobtrusively. Tuuri grows outwards and thicker about the forearms and thighs. Already, she is a strong girl. Lalli just stays wiry. He finds it hard to put on weight, harder to eat. Sometimes, if Lalli will not touch his dinner, Onni’s aunt and uncle summon him to try his hand at feeding him.  
Onni has the perfect tactic. He just takes the plate for himself and starts to eat the dinner, and suddenly Lalli is incredibly interested and willing to fight Onni for his food. In the flailing-feather-fists and sullen frowning way of his.

When Lalli is six and Tuuri is eight, Lalli is discovered to be a mage.  
While he is fetching ammunition for his father’s rifle, Onni catches Lalli whispering something to a bedraggled flower. He stops, and thinks privately that his cousin is a very strange person. Then the flower’s closed bud spreads open, the previously bent and withered stem straightens, and its face turns for the sun. 

Lalli’s huge grey eyes swivel up at fix on Onni.

“What.”

Onni finishes his chore before he tells his uncle. His uncle is understandably proud; grandmother’s magical genes have skipped him, his siblings too, and they had almost lost any hope for producing a family with any enhanced abilities. Except for Onni, who knew himself to be a mage from pretty much the moment he could speak- he let other people know when he spoke of people that were not in the room.

Lalli is not happy with him.

One day, instead of just glaring and refusing to speak to him the way he normally does, Lalli confronts it openly “I didn’t want them to know.”

“It’s a serious thing. You’re a mage, Lalli, and you need to know how to be a mage so you won’t get hurt.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“It’s a matter of training, not stupidity.”

“Grandma doesn’t think so. Grandma says-”

“Grandma’s always talking. Not everything she says is a pearl of wisdom.”

Then Lalli falls silent, leaving Onni to wonder if he has said too much. Lalli assumes their grandmother is the pinnacle of ancient wisdom and power. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to dash that idea already.

“What’s a pearl?” asks Lalli.

Their grandmother dies a week later.  
She takes their parents with her.

Onni is left with two children. At the age of fourteen, Onni has a six year old and an eight year old under his wings. He has no idea what to do, except that they need to get out of Saimaa as fast as they can. The thing which killed their grandmother and by extension their parents will come back soon. It is up to Onni to make sure they are not around when it returns.

It is also his duty to make sure Tuuri and Lalli are prepared for the world, in all of its substantial wonders and inescapable horrors.

And he does.

 

(Year 90)

The old man’s name is Trond. Every few minutes, Onni is possessed by a demonic urge to slap the old man’s bald head. The light on the pate is so delicate. So tempting. One good slap would surely rid him of the urge. Besides, it would be immensely satisfying. Perhaps Onni wouldn’t feel this way if he codger had managed to get his family on the horn more than once since he has arrived in Mora.

Onni is just raising his hand to strike when the radio wheezes into life with a static cough. He reels back, ashamed and surprised at himself, and at the radio.

Trond speaks for a few minutes in a language Onni isn’t familiar with. Norwegian, he thinks.  
It is all he can do not to snatch the microphone out of his hand and start screaming for his sister and his cousin.  
When Trond finally hands the microphone over, Onni has to wipe his eyes and swallow hard before he can speak.

Tuuri’s voice is in his ear “Onni?”

“Yeah.”

“Onni! So many things have happened, oh my gods, it was amazing this week! And totally terrifying, but mostly just awesomely amazing! I’m gonna have some serious war stories when I see you next.”

He doesn’t know if that is supposed to be comforting. What he does know is that his sister’s voice is confident, strong and very adult. She sounds as if she knows what she is doing. Besides that, enjoying doing it.  
And it puts a smile on his face for the first time in a long time.

Tuuri chatters for a little while. She hardly tells him anything for the volume of words. Most of it is just spew. Word-spew, which she is very good at.

“…and then it took all three of us to re-braid Reynir’s hair. Lalli, stop, I’m not finished.”

He hears a muffled voice in the background “You’ve been talking forever.”

“And I plan to talk for an eternity more! Geddof!”

There is the sound of a brief struggle. A few thumps. A few curses are exchanged.

And then it’s Lalli’s voice in his ear. Gods, does he sound tired.  
“Onni.”

“Yeah.”

“I just woke up.”

“I can tell. Is it hard work?”

“It’s always hard work.”

Onni feels a pang in his chest. Lalli is right; it was always hard work, but Onni always loved it. Somehow, this is a kind of reward. Talking to his cousin (his secret brother) from the other side of the Known World and knowing his cousin has finally stepped out of his comfort zone. Lunged, more like.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Are you crying?”

“No! Why do you always ask that?”

“You sound like you’re crying. You do it all the time.”

“I do not,” Onni pauses to wipe a single tear- a single one, mind you. He isn’t exactly sobbing “I’m not crying. But you say you’re doing alright?”

“Yes.”

“How alright?”

“Onni, we’re fine.”

“Words mean different things with you. You said you were fine the time you broke your ankle.”

“I was fine.”

Trond is staring at him hard. Whatever impression he has of their conversation, he does not seem amused.

“I have to go soon, Lalli. Listen, I love you both, alright?”

“Alright.”

A pause.

“We love you too.”

And it only took him nineteen years to say it.

Onni hands the microphone back to Trond and excuses himself. He needs to find a suitably secure and sound-proofed closet where he can cry for a little while.


	12. 24: Time is running out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir is sick. There is some discussion about what should be done.

Reynir is sick.

They do not know what it is yet, but it is certain he is sick. The colour has gone from his cheeks. His breathing is laboured and slow. He has no energy to help any more, let alone to run around like he used to. At the moment, the only thing he can do is lie on the bunk they have relegated him to and try to breathe through what sounds like lungs growing smaller with each breath he takes.

Out of a well-founded fear that he might die when they are not looking, Sigrun has decided that one person must be at his bedside at all hours.   
This duty is often taken by Mikkel and Tuuri, who can do their work from his bedside. In the evening, if he does not collapse immediately from exhaustion, Emil takes over. He has proved the most tender of nurses, which is surprising. Though Reynir cannot begin to understand a word of what he is saying to him, Emil will talk to him. Most of it concerns what they have done over the course of the day Reynir missed. Some of it is encouragement, and confidence that Reynir will recover, if he just hangs on for a few more days and lets his immune system do what it is built to do.

Every now and then, Lalli takes up the position at the bed-side. He says nothing. Out loud anyway. Sigrun and Mikkel share the suspicion that when Lalli seems to doze off lightly beside Reynir, he’s visiting him in his mage-space, or whatever they call it, to make sure his soul isn’t rotting away. Lalli doesn’t make a fuss, so it is generally presumed Reynir’s soul is fine.

He regains consciousness every now and then, with long hours stretching out between the periods of lucidity. He will be awake and responsive just long enough to ask how long he was out for, take some water, a little food, go to the bathroom and change his clothes, then the moment he lies back down, saying he still feels tired, he falls back into the feverish state.

Reynir has been doing this for two full days when Sigrun pulls Mikkel to the side.

“Have you ever seen a fully blown case of the Rash?” 

“Of course.”

Sigrun nods to the tank, where Reynir is asleep under Tuuri’s watchful eye “Freckles has something bad. It’s either the Rash or some unholy pathogen our societies haven’t seen since the Rash spread.”

The problem with the Rash theory is that Reynir shows no outward signs of developing the illness. In all of the cases Sigrun has ever seen, the body degraded at a frantic rate. By the time the victims were in their fifth day of sickness, the pinpricks of angry red on their skin had become bulbous tumours of pus and festering flesh, smelling of death in the same way trolls do.  
Reynir just smells like he normally does- like sweet hair, wool and a little bit sheep-ey.

When she voices her doubts to Mikkel, his response surprises her. What surprises her even more is the way his face remains perfectly calm and collected as he recounts the story.

“Did you know I’m a twin?”

“Uh, no.”

“My sister died in our late teens. Nineteen years old. She fell sick with the Rash. We looked a great deal alike, in spite of being different genders. Identical twins can never come out of differently gendered twins…anyway, it would appear she missed out on the immunity in the family as well. When she fell sick with the Rash, it manifested as a fever for the first week. I – we, thought she had a bad cold or pneumonia. Where I lived in Bornholm, there isn’t much to do about pneumonia except get whatever antibiotics the doctor has and feed the patient a lot of soup. We treated it as a case of pneumonia because we had no indication it wasn’t. There was just nothing. None of the rashes. She was speaking perfectly clearly up until it took her over. One day I went into the room we had had to quarantine her to, and I saw her arm had swollen in the night.”

“Swollen?”

“You know. Expanded. Gone grey. Dead. Rotting on her body.”

“She was already gone, wasn’t she?”

He nods. His eyes are completely blank of emotion “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Must have stood in the doorway for ten minutes, just watching the infection creeping from her arm to the rest of her. She started to make those revolting gurgling noises trolls make when they see prey.”

“I know the one.”

“One of our brothers heard the noise and pulled me out of the room before she could get up and come for me.”

Mikkel falls silent. Sigrun senses she should not ask, but she has to know.

“Did you take care of her?”

“Yes.”

They stand in silence for a few moments. Sigrun knows from experience there is nothing she can say to bring him comfort. She knows she has always hated it when people try to tell her she did her best for friends and comrades lost.  
She can’t begin to imagine what it is like to lose a twin. Silence is better, sometimes.

But one of them has to draw a conclusion.

As the leader, Sigrun is prepared to throw herself under the bus. Whatever happens next is her fault entirely.  
“This is a decent area. There’s plenty of things to pick over, here. Emil and I are going to go about business as normal. In addition to your normal duties, you and Tuuri will have to keep an eye on Reynir’s condition. The skinny one-”

“Lalli.”

“That’s the one. She’s-”

“He.”

“He’s gonna keep an eye on us. If the troll activity gets to be too much, we move on.”

 

Neither of them mentions Reynir is essentially a dead weight to the team. An expendable member, consuming valuable resources and now their time.  
Or if Reynir does have some lurking, sneaking form of the Rash, he has already infected Tuuri.

With the resources around them and the relative lack of trolls to bother them, the team has an abundance of time.

What remains mysterious is how much is left to Reynir. And, by extension, Tuuri.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why this one ends the way it does.  
> It just kind of does?


	13. 43: Dying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death comes for Sigrun. Sigrun says "no thanks"

Over the course of her long career, which pretty much began as soon as she could stand up straight with the weight of a sword in her hands (so that would have been, what, seven years old?), Sigrun has had a few very, very close calls. Some of them so close she is surprised she made it through those. Case in point? That pissy Cthulhu monster thingie on the flooded station.

That thing was determined to drown her, decapitate her, or all of the above. Sigrun is pretty sure she only made it through that particular mess because Mikkel was there and briefly possessed by some deity of luck, or something else like that.  
And now, only three days later, her life is again at risk.

This time, though, it doesn’t look like she’s going to make it.

Of all of the ways to die, she has heard being pinned under rubble is definitely the worst. You get stuck under something that might be crushing your organs or bones, and if the impact doesn’t kill you, then the long, slow wait for starvation or death by dehydration does. It kills the spirit, mostly, so people die broken and hopeless. Great men and women are reduced to snivelling wrecks and die, regressed to children wanting their mothers.

If Sigrun had been told this is the way she was going to die, she would have gone back to the tentacle monster and demanded a rematch.

It’s not that there is no honour in this death; this death is just going to be very, very long and painful and something she does not need to deal with.

Emil is lucky. He got out before she did, searching for that infernal mage. Sigrun can only hope Skinny got out as well. On the bright side, even if he was inside the building when it started to come down, he’s so thin that he’ll just be able to squeeze through the tiny cracks and gaps in the chunks of rubble until he’s found his way to daylight.  
Sigrun could be considered lucky. She knows she is not going to drown in her own bodily fluids, because she has ended up in a small, constricted space. Not enough room to turn around, but it’s close to the sky and there’s a shaft of life she can lie in and think about life and stuff.

She won’t suffocate. She won’t die of ruptured organs. She may die when the night comes, though. It gets blasted cold in Denmark. So, yes, she has decided, it will most likely be the night which kills her.

“Balls.” says Sigrun to no one in particular.

Her throat hurts, so she takes a swig of water to soothe the dryness. It occurs to her she could start screaming for help, but that’s not really her style.  
Why not sing instead? Sounds good. If the boys (she is pretty sure Lalli’s one of those, right?) have the chance to look for her, to wade through the destruction of this damned feeble building, it will make their task a lot easier if she is singing some siren song.

But does she have the energy?

No. No she does not.

They aren’t looking for her. They had to run, probably, from the troll which knocked the building on top of them in the first place.

Poor Emil- this is really going to mess him up. Sigrun feels a pang of regret. If there is one thing she would have liked to do before she died, it is make a better warrior out of that boy. He’s so young. So promising. There’s a steel in him he hasn’t quite recognised or realised yet. Been so busy worrying about what the rest of the world thinks of him, he hasn’t noticed there is something worth talking about within him.  
Sigrun wishes she could be around to see him discover it. She noticed it the first day- and then came Tuuri’s report of the train journey over. She apparently watched Emil’s first kill through the cracked glass doors that divided her and the troll, and the others, and she saw him freak out and just blindly wallop a troll in its face.

Honestly, whose first instinct is to punch a troll that almost killed them? Most people would just run away screaming. 

They’re all going to be something special to see, when they figure out what they’re doing; Tuuri, Lalli, Emil and Reynir.  
And she wishes she had had the time to figure out Mikkel. Obviously, someone he loves is dead. Probably a sibling or two. Sigrun does not know much about losing siblings, of course, since she has never had one, but she knows plenty of people who have lost family to battle, to sickness, to the Rash and to freak tractor accidents. Mikkel definitely has the air of someone who wakes up every morning thinking about death, and who they have lost to death.

She wants to know who that person was. They must have been important to him. She is interested to see the kind of person which merits Mikkel Madsen’s attention and regard.

And now she will. In death. Didn’t see that one coming.

Sigrun is just musing on the cruel whims of fate and the universe and all when she hears an unmistakable voice.  
Not that she has ever heard it consciously before. It’s just a voice that everyone knows in some way. The moment she hears it, she thinks ‘oh, yep, that’s Death talking to me’.

And then Death is folded up in the tiny space beside her. She kneels at Sigrun’s feet with an irritating, beatific look of melancholy, and wears nothing but her sad smile. Half of her is weathered, beaten bone. The other half is grey flesh, somehow managing the impossibility of sagging with sorrow while also remaining taut and beautiful in youth. As she speaks, her bone jaw works up and down in tandem with the flesh. Sigrun watches, mesmerised, as half a tongue flaps.

“My child. Do you know who I am?”

She wonders if she should be in awe of this woman “You sure ain’t my mom.”

The woman blinks a single black eye slowly, mournfully. The bare socket clicks oddly, as if it’s trying to do the same “No, I am not.”

“So don’t call me ‘my child’. That’s what my mother calls me. That and ‘sweetie’, so let’s not get all intimate and cutesy with the endearments. Just call me Sigrun. Or Captain Eide. Or ‘lowly mortal’, I don’t care. Just don’t start slinging words like ‘daughter’ and ‘child’ around.”

“Are you afraid of me? Surprised to see me?”

Sigrun snorts, gesturing around the confines of her improvised coffin as best she can “I’d be more surprised if you didn’t show. I just got buried under about fifty million kilograms of rubble.”

The woman lays a skeletal hand on Sigrun’s ankle. The sensation is of pins and needles and a winter chill “This must be very confronting for you.”

“You seem to think this is the first time I’ve had a beautiful, naked lady kneeling at my feet.”

Sigrun resists the urge to laugh at her own joke. Yep, that was a good one. If she has to pick any last words, she’s just going to repeat that.

Death, whose name is actually Hel (if Sigrun’s slightly death-fogged memory serves), does not give any sign of hearing this. She continues on with her whole ‘loving death’ pitch, and with every syllable, Sigrun grows more and more impatient.  
“In the old days, we would have welcomed you to Valhalla with a fanfare of Valkyries. Your bravery is famous. Your stories are told all over Asgard.”

Which stories, she wonders? The good ones, like the time she set the international record for most Giants killed with a rolling pin? Or the embarrassing ones, like the time she slipped on a slope and flew right into a troll’s open mouth, then had to hack her way out while her Norwegian comrades howled with laughter?  
She hopes the gods prefer her heroic triumphs to her blunders, which regularly end up just as heroic, but far, far more embarrassing to recount.

“Nice.”

Hel continues “Unfortunately, given the small Ragnarok we’re experiencing at the moment, things have gone a little bit to seed. Everyone pulls a double shift. You see, I now collect all the dead. Not just the dishonoured dead- which I assure you, you are not.”

Now Sigrun is confused “Am I dead yet?”

“No. It’s a slow day, so I figured I would come in early and spare you a painful death.”

She frowns, feeling a pang of pain behind her ear. Finally, now in the presence of death, she’s beginning to feel whatever her injuries are. The darkness means she has not had much chance to investigate them for herself.  
“So how does this count as an honourable death? If I’m just dying in the dark, unarmed, how is that…a Valhalla’s hero’s death?”

“You’ve done enough to qualify yourself. Given our present troubles, we have relaxed quite a bit of the regulations. Not every hero has the time to find a weapon before they die. Why, just yesterday I collected a woman who died by putting her body between a troll and her children, allowing her children to escape. She fought with only her fists- well, really, just the spine she thrust in the troll’s faces, but you understand. It would be criminal to deprive this woman of her place in Valhalla just because of some silly rules the All-Father invented when he was drunk off his holy bottom on mead.”

Sigrun has always wondered why the gods do not appear to their worshippers very often. Listening to Hel run her half-mouth, her half-tongue flapping animatedly, she sees why. They’d ruin the religion for everyone and have disillusioned most of their faithful in the first year of visitations.

“What if I’m not ready to die yet?” asks Sigrun.

Except she doesn’t ask. She just states it, as the simple fact that it is, and watches Hel’s brow crumple. The bone half does this too, to a disturbing effect.

“You have no choice in the matter.”

“Don’t I?”

“You don’t. Have I not made that clear?”

“Well if I’m not dead yet, it seems a little unfair. Someone could winch me out of this coffin at any moment.”  
Though if Emil and Lalli have half a brain between them, they will have run back to the safety of the tank and its grumpy guardian Dane by now.

“Have you seen your injuries?” the god cocks her lone eyebrow. The skull half also manages to look scathingly sceptical.

“No, it’s dark as Loki’s soul in here- oh, excuse me, my Lord, no disrespect to your honoured father.”

A single, dark eye rolls swiftly. Her cheeks are fantastically shrunken- the more Sigrun looks at her, the less she likes her.  
“No trouble. It’s true. My honoured father is a cheeky bastard. He deserves much more than the snake venom he’s getting. You know, this whole blasted thing is probably his fault? We haven’t quite worked out who let what plague out of what pantheon, but this doesn’t look like Greek or Haitian handiwork to me, you know? Never mind. You’ll learn about that after your death.”

Her hand still rests on Sigrun’s ankle. Once, Sigrun came very close to contracting frostbite, pulling a double-shift on a battle field in the middle of a blizzard. Her ankle has begun to feel numb and hot the same way the hand she nearly lost did, on that wind-blasted tundra.

With a supreme, painful effort, Sigrun crooks her leg up and tugs her ankle out of Hel’s reach. The movement confirms her suspicion that she has strained her ankle or possibly the whole damned leg, but there’s little to do about it right now, in this place.  
So as to make it look natural, Sigrun tents the other leg too. She brings her knee into the shaft of weak sun and sees it is wet with blood. But just from a cut, which is not dumping too much of her life-blood out.

Sigrun rips a strip from the bottom of her tunic and sets about binding the cut shut.

Hel is not pleased “There is no need for that. Your physical body will soon be vacated-”

“Yeah, I’m not really keen on that idea, you know?” the air has begun to grow thick within her little coffin. Sigrun suspects this is Hel’s fault “I’m only thirty-two. I have a lot of stuff I want to do, you know? I’ve only ever had teenaged-love affairs and one-night stands. I’d like to get a steady partner. Clean out Norway- heck, the whole Known World. Have a kid. Stuff like that.”

Have a child? Did she just say that? Well, her mother always did tell her there were things she would not know about herself until she had stared death in the face- she would know, with the number of near-death experiences she has had. Though General Eide has probably never stared death in the face in the literal sense, as her daughter is now having to do.

Apparently, one of the things Sigrun wants is a kid.  
More than just one, in fact. Being an only child is pretty lonely.

Hel is even less pleased by this “You are at the end of your life.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Sigrun, I am quite literally death. I know these things.”

Sigrun flinches at the sound of her name in death’s voice. That is something she never wants to hear again “Aren’t you ever wrong?”

“Rarely. I did not think you would be one for bargaining.”

“I’m not bargaining. I’m debating.” she ties the final knot of her sloppy bandage and inspects it. The bandage will do, but if she survives to show it to Mikkel, he’s going to be very smug about his superior skills “There’s a long history of people debating with death, isn’t there?”

“Well, yes-”

“Then who are you to deprive me of my rights to argue? Now, I know you’re trying to do me a kindness here and I appreciate that, I really do,” she would do anything to get Hel out of her personal bubble “But you’re also getting rid of any chance I might still have for survival.”

“Oh really? And how do you intend to survive?”

“I’ll think of something.”

She turns, and Hel is just a pale, disgruntled shadow in the corner of her vision.

She’s just going to push on the walls, the ceiling and the floor until something gives; being trapped with death makes one feel remarkably daring.  
First, she pushes at the ceiling. She need not try anywhere else; the chunk of rock flies off of her like she is pushing on a hatch.

Light blinds her. Without meaning to, Sigrun withdraws an arm to cover her eyes. But somehow, the rock doesn’t sink back onto her. Instead, it lifts out of her hands and is cast to the side.

“Sigrun!” cries a familiar voice “Oh, thank the gods!”

Both of her arms are caught- both in two hands. She manages to squint out the shape of her rescuers against the dying and blinding sun.  
As it turns out, Emil and Lalli do not have half a brain between them.

“No,” she croaks “Don’t you dare thank them. She might come back and try to finish her favour.”

 

A few long, painful hours later, Sigrun is finally in her bunk.  
Everything is bruised, but nothing is broken. What she thought was a strain turned out to be a large splinter stuck in her ankle. What she felt as a small pang of pain behind her ear turned out to be half of the ear being shorn off, presumably by some lucky piece of metal shrapnel that’s lying with its bloody prize in the wreckage of the building.

Whatever. It’s not like her hearing has been damaged any worse than it already is.

She lies in her bunk, her eyelids feeling like they are made of cement. Distantly, she hears Mikkel and Emil talking.

“…Lalli wouldn’t leave me and I wouldn’t leave her, so we just looked for two hours. I honestly thought she’d been buried.”

“You were lucky to find her.”

“No, actually. She started talking to herself.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. I think…dehydration, maybe? I was on a training session once, with a woman who got so dehydrated she started calling me ‘Grandpa’. Every time we tried to get her to take some water, she puked it back up on us. Sigrun isn’t-”

“Sigrun is in remarkably good health for someone who spent a few hours under a building. She’ll be fine, soon. Springing around tomorrow, if I don’t lash her to her bunk.”

Sigrun smiles.  
She made it.

Talking to herself, though? That’s a little bit disconcerting to hear. It confirms for her that Emil and Lalli really didn’t see a thing, did they?  
She could have well hallucinated the half-skeleton at her knees. Otherwise, why would death come to her? Her injuries are superficial, according to Mikkel, who was annoying thorough in prodding her in his check-over for internal injuries. Apart from feeling as if she has been kicked down several flights of stairs then run over by a tractor, Sigrun is fine.

She must have imagined it.

Half an hour later, just as she is beginning to believe herself, Lalli slinks into the room. He escaped their misadventure with a cut on one cheek that’s going to scar beautifully and a huge bruise on his upper-chest.  
He regards Sigrun with a mixture of curiosity and wariness- the expression she has seen cats wearing when they’re deciding if they should try to bite a hedgehog.

“Hey, skinny. How’s it going?”  
She knows he has no idea what she’s saying, but the sound of a friendly voice might convince him it’s alright to come into the room.

He scoots a little bit closer. 

“What’s on your mind?”

His grey eyes are wide and troubled.

Then he addresses her for the first time since the mission began “Hel?”

Sigrun’s bruised heart skips a beat.

“Hel.” she echoes, nodding.

Lalli frowns. He leans forward and pats her very gently on the shoulder. The edge of his mouth quirks slightly in what might be the start of a tentative smile. Then Tuuri busts in, full of righteous frustration and fury (she’s still trying to figure out what the hell a ‘selfie’ is, which is a word that is dropped repeatedly in some of the modern texts they have recovered) and shoos him in Finnish.

“Sorry, Sigrun. He’s probably just worried you might die. He told me earlier- you smell of death.” Tuuri flicks her cousin on the back of the head as he scarpers, but her face is now fond and forgiving “He’s so weird sometimes.”

Before he leaves the room, Lalli’s eyes meet Sigrun’s one more time.

This time, he does smile. A real, reassuring and relieved smile. He’s happy she survived.

Sigrun smiles back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's our Sigrun. Too busy being the most best awesome Captain to do silly things like die


	14. 39: Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir wakes up one morning and finds his dreams have chased him into the waking world.  
> Or not. But there must be a good reason there are glittery animals following everyone around, right?

On an unseasonably warm morning about half-way through the week, Reynir wakes up to a dog licking his face.

This confuses him for several reasons. One of them is quite obvious: there should not be a dog in the tank. There should not be a dog in the Silent World that doesn’t look like that horrifying doodle Emil produced for that equally gross book about Rash victims, which Mikkel and Tuuri are so enamoured of.  
He is about to freak out- because it has to be sick, and it’s spreading is horrible pathogen all over Reynir’s non-immune face- when he recognises the dog.

This, while a happy little revelation, just confuses him even more.

Reynir reaches out cautiously and pats the head of the red dog from his dreams.

“Hello,” he says softly “What are you doing here? What a good boy. You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”

How did this dog get here? Reynir is pretty sure this dog isn’t real. How could it appear in his dreams if it is? Like, unless it’s a dog-mage. There’s an idea.  
Well if he and Lalli have their dream-spaces and can visit each other’s freely (depending on if Lalli actually wants him there or not), then why not a dog?

The excitement of the dog materialising is not enough to distract Reynir from the fact that he’s the last up again. He’s been trying to get up early enough to help Mikkel with the morning chores, but he always ends up getting up late. Later than Emil, Lalli and Sigrun, if they haven’t spent the majority of the previous day fighting for their lives.  
Definitely later than Tuuri, who keeps farmer’s hours like Mikkel.

And by the time he gets up, Mikkel is usually done with most of the chores. Honestly, it’s almost like he tries to get them all done before Reynir gets up!

Reynir leaps out of his bedding. He is about to gather his things and retreat into the closet they use for janitorial equipment, and changing in the morning, when he notices another thing that confuses him about the dog. The dog is not covered by the blanket that he threw off. It passes through the blanket as easily as air through a crack.

Reynir’s jaw drops.

Rather belatedly, he notices the dog is made of a delicate, gold-tinged light. Its paws are not connected with the floor either and its eyes are a bright, unnerving quality, the way a cat’s eyes look when they are shining out of some dark crevice. 

He takes a deep breath. The dog floats from about knee-height to neck-height and licks him again. The sensation is of a slightly hot, damp breeze blowing over the bridge of his nose. Reynir tries unsuccessfully not to yelp.

Tuuri pops her head around the door “Morning. Sleep alright?”

Reynir turns to her, his face chalk-white “Good. You?”

She cocks an eyebrow “Bad dreams?”

“I…I think, maybe I had some? I don’t know. Uh, I have to-”  
He stops and gathers his clothes, then backs into the closet silently. Tuuri watches this all with a look of faint alarm on her face.

Half of the dog is pushed through the door. The other, end half hangs outside, Reynir imagines, with a wagging tail.  
It is difficult to get changed with the huge eyes trained on him, following his every movement. Eventually, Reynir turns his back to it. The dog floats the rest of the way into the closet and thrusts its face between Reynir’s arms as he pulls on his sweater.

Again, he yelps.

“Are you alright in there?” asks Mikkel from outside.

Surely that yelp wasn’t that loud, was it?  
Embarrassed, Reynir clears his throat and pushes the dog’s head away from his mouth “I’m alright! I just, uh, pulled my hair!”

Hair. Today is Hair Day- the day of the week when he unfurls his braid and takes to it with a comb and a mouthful of cusses he feels guilty for saying, when he’s done. Hair Day immediately follows after Washing Day, which is the day of the week when he takes his hair down to wash it. He has long since lost that touch of guilt at letting his hair go unwashed for so long- when one has the amount of hair Reynir has, standard hygienic conventions are neither necessary nor plausible.

It’s going to be a little bit harder than normal, what, with the semi-transparent dog licking his face and trying to clamber into his lap.

Tuuri didn’t see the dog, did she? That must mean this is something mage-like. Maybe if he goes to Lalli and shows him his dog, Lalli will know what to do. He can use Tuuri as a translator and Reynir will be able to figure out what in the Hel is going on. He just hopes he isn’t attracting ghosts now, whether or not they are cute, affectionate dogs which have appeared in his dreams.

When Reynir emerges into the warm morning, a hair-brush in one hand and the other flapping behind his back in an effort to keep the dog from chewing on his loose hair, he looks around for Lalli. Lalli is often hard to find in the snow; grey-eyed and silver-haired, with skin as white as his is, he basically blends into the snow until he sneezes or his coat snaps a breeze.

Perching on a flat, mossy rock, Reynir starts the lengthy process of unravelling his braid as he looks about him for any sign of Lalli. He can see Emil on his stomach underneath the tank. He’s making noises that sound like he’s either trying to speak chicken or coax the kitty out from under the tank with promises of treats and pets.

Tuuri rustles around in the tank, making a papery sound and the occasional mewl of frustration. He can see Mikkel hanging the clothes out to take advantage of the unusual warmth. Reynir wants to get up and help, but he won’t be going anywhere until he’s finished brushing out his hair. Now, with his hair completely loose, he gives it a shake.

The sensation of relief almost makes him want to keep it down. When he wears his hair in a braid for so long, it starts to feel as if the roots of his hair are attached to his brain and pulling it to the roof of his skull. But then the wind stirs, and all of a sudden there are long red locks flying everywhere, most of which seem to be trying to crawl down his throat, and Reynir remembers why he always wears his hair up.

“Reynir!” Tuuri sticks her head out of the door “Where’d Emil go?”

Reynir nods towards Emil.

Seeing him, Tuuri laughs and says something encouraging in Swedish. At Tuuri’s appearance, the dog grows extremely excited and bounds over to her in airy little leaps. Tuuri takes no notice as it circles her feet, shoulders and head, yipping fit to wake the dead. She only scratches her nose and blinks a few times, as if there is a piece of grit in her eye. 

Before she can disappear into her paper pile again, Reynir asks “Where did your cousin go?”

“Lalli left about an hour ago to do some scouting. He went that way,” she waves vaguely in the direction of the woods, which runs parallel to their camping spot “He’ll be back in less than an hour, maybe. If he listens to what I told him Sigrun told him to do.”

Tuuri goes back inside, leaving Reynir to stew over his troubles alone.

How is he going to deal with this dog for the next maybe-hour? This is so frustrating! Why couldn’t his parents let him adventure a little more? Or, like, at all? Then maybe they would have discovered he was a mage earlier and put him in training, and instead of being a useless, hairy stow-a-way he would be a valuable member of the team!  
It occurs to him, even as he wallows in his uselessness, that he had better call that dog back. He heard it go yapping into the tank. Even if Tuuri isn’t conscious there is a dog bugging her, Reynir shouldn’t let the dog bug her.

Not wanting to whistle at nothing, from the others’ perspective anyway, Reynir gets up and walks to the entry of the tank. Emil scoots out of his way and straightens up, the cat in his hands.

He scolds her in Swedish, then pops her in his pocket. Emil looks up at him and nods. Reynir nods back at him, though he would really, really like to tell Emil about the weird ghost-dog following him around. 

Too late. Too late to even chatter at him in a language he doesn’t understand, because now Emil is up and headed over to Mikkel.

Then, as Reynir watches him go regretfully, the most beautiful stag he has ever seen casually strolls out from behind the tank and falls in step with Emil. At a glance, Reynir can tell it is another of the insubstantial creatures just like his own persistent little stalker.  
Made of air and gold light- except this one has a great deal of silver in its pelt too. Its horns are huge, branched and tapered to extreme points at the end. Much more pointy than normal stag horns.

Unnerved, Reynir watches the stag’s hooves in the vain hope that there might be a trail of prints after it.  
No such luck.

Now Emil has an animal stalker too. Great.

It must sense him staring. When Emil reaches Mikkel and starts talking, totally oblivious to the majestic giant behind him, the stag swivels its gold head around and regards Reynir with suspicious eyes. In the place of normal, dark deer eyes are hollows filled with a light that makes Reynir’s legs to look at.

Reynir waves awkwardly.  
The stag dips is head. For a terrifying second, Reynir is sure he’s about to be charged and gored with semi-solid horns. Instead, the stag straightens up and trots around Emil- partially through Emil, causing him to shiver.

Did that stag just ‘sup him?  
Reynir thinks that stag just sup’-ed him.

“Hej Freckles.”  
Sigrun materialises at his shoulder and ruffles his hair as she passes, using the only phrase in her vocabulary Reynir can currently understand. It is only because Reynir is so stunned to have been greeted by the stag like a buddy that he doesn’t leap out of his boots screaming.

He turns to watch Sigrun go into the tank. Flecked with blood, as usual, but not troll blood- otherwise she wouldn’t have touched him. Or come near him. She’s very accommodating towards her non-immune team members like that. Well, the non-immune team member and the hairy stow-a-way that came with her provisions, infesting the tuna like vermin.

And then, just to prove Reynir’s morning can get a whole lot weirder and apparently intends to, an incandescently black shape slithers out of Sigrun’s collar and onto her shoulder.  
It has a little face, arranged around a pointy little nose over which a set of small, hollow eyes peep. They, too, are alive with a white energy.

Reynir feels it only appropriate to wave to this too.

The animal- a sable, he thinks- snorts at him, then licks its little black lips and wriggles back under Sigrun’s collar. If Sigrun notices the rodent squirming into her jacket, she gives no indication of it. Inside the tank, the dog still barks. 

Bewildered, Reynir stumbles over to Mikkel. He needs someone who makes sense. He needs someone solid and stoic and who can make the nonsensical things go away.  
He has to pass the stag again. The stag seems to be content with standing behind Emil. Its head rests on his shoulder and he doesn’t even notice. The stag looks remarkably like a faithful dog or a close friend waiting for Emil to finish his conversation.

That is, until the cherry on this sundae of a weird morning lumbers silently around the side of the tank, and the stag’s ears prick up. The stag approaches the enormous grizzly bear which has just waddled around the tank and butts its shoulder with its head, obviously happy to see it.  
The stag circles the bear a few times, butting the same shoulder each time it passes it.

Finally, the grizzly lifts a massive paw- seriously, a paw the size of Reynir- and puts it on top of the stag’s head. Holding it in place.  
The bear then leans back, with a groan, and sits back in the snow on its back legs. The stag prances around it, trailing gold sparks and wisps that look a little bit like snow-flakes.

Now that Reynir has finished being stunned over the sheer, bloody size and volume of the bear, he appreciates the colour of its pelt. A lot of blacks and blonds and yellows and golds, all swirled together the way water looks with oil on its surface. Its claws are definitely the most solid part of it. Its feet could be made of mist and the rest of it, perhaps fog. But the claws?  
The claws could be rock.

Reynir thinks for a moment.

Then he gathers his courage and passes Emil and Mikkel, nodding to both. He stops in front of the bear. The stag comes up behind Reynir and tucks Reynir’s head under its chin. It seems to like having Reynir for a chin-rest.

This makes Reynir a little more reluctant to sit down, but he figures he has to sit down next to the bear to show it he’s not afraid.  
So he does.

With the sound of wind blowing through the bones of a house, the bear lifts a massive paw and brings it down very, very, very gently on top of Reynir’s head. The bear does this a few more times until it is satisfied. Then it leans a little further back and collapses completely into the snow.  
The bear appears to have gone to sleep.

At the same time, Mikkel pauses in his work to yawn widely. 

Finally, the dots connect. Reynir is amazed at his own idiocy. How did he not see this?

The dog tumbles out of the tank at about chest-height, followed by an incredibly chubby, sleek silver seal with a pelt peppered with spots of red and gold. It barks in harmony with the dog and flaps its tail, rather uselessly, he thinks, since it seems to be able to move with little effort.

The seal, Tuuri, and the dog, himself, chase each other in a circle above the tank. A few seconds later the sable slithers out like an eel and seems to chastise them both for their silliness. They do not listen. And soon the sable has hitched a ride on Tuuri-seal’s back and hisses playfully at their pursuer. Reynir can feel his mind clearing and his pulse picking up from the stagnant, tired rate it fell to as he slept.

So this is how he wakes up in the morning? His animal self gets some exercise?  
They call them something in Finland, something that remains infuriatingly out of his reach. The Icelandic word, too, has slipped his mind.

But he knows what they look like, to him. Like dreams that bled from his and the team’s ears last night to come out and dance and play with each other. Or, in the bear’s case, to catch up on his sleep while his physical body went through the motions like a man programmed for it.

Reynir notices the gold stag is now standing at the edge of the campgrounds. It watches the forest intensely, its ears back.  
He cannot help but smile. Emil looks like that, sometimes, when he is especially anxious for Lalli to get back.

Pocketing the hairbrush, Reynir stands and goes over to Mikkel. Now that Emil has gone off somewhere to do Cleanser things, he makes no effort to look awake.

Reynir taps his shoulder “Why don’t you let me finish that? You look like you could use some sleep.”

Mikkel considers this for a few seconds. It’s a toss-up between his pride and his sleep. The bear snores gently behind them.  
Sleep wins.

Handing the basket of laundry over to Reynir, he yawns “Thank you. I can’t seem to keep my eyes open this morning.”

Reynir shrugs “Happens to the best of us. Have a good nap.”

His hair flutters around him, feather-like and light in the wind. It is not so bad to wear it down, every now and then. As Reynir plucks a soggy tunic from the basket and reaches for the pin to hang it, he grins.

He can’t wait to see what kind of spirit animal Lalli has.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These ideas were lifted/borrowed from a pretty recent conversation over on the Head-canons thread. It was recent enough, so anyone who wants to add to that particular batch of head-canons can go over to that thread and add their two cents. 
> 
> And just in case it got a little confusing
> 
> Sigrun = sable  
> Mikkel = unusually big grizzly bear  
> Tuuri= cute and fluffy seal  
> Reynir= his dog  
> Emil= beautiful, fabulous, sparkly blond stag  
> And Lalli would just have his lynx lyxing around after him


	15. 9: Drive

Keuruu is a lot bigger than Saimaa, in more than just the physical sense.

Saimaa was a small, small town, isolated by the death it sat in. Everyone there was Finnish and their families had been Finnish for generations. Tuuri hadn’t even known people came in different varieties than white Finnish until they had to leave for Keuruu, and the first time she saw someone with dark skin she literally tripped over her own feet.

Being young and curious, she marched up to the woman who she now, looking back on it, realises must have been a Norwegian officer, and asked “Are you ok?”

The woman smiled indulgently at her and bent to talk at her level “Yes, I’m fine.”

“But what about your skin? Did you get burnt?”

Thankfully, the woman didn’t take offense. She just saw Tuuri for what she was; a little girl out in the world for the first time, with no concept of people and culture other than the one she had been raised in so far.  
“It’s a skin condition,” she replied “It’s called Pakistani.”

Tuuri grew distraught “Can you get better?”

“Oh, it doesn’t hurt. It just means I have wonderful hair and nice black eyes.”

Tuuri was swiftly enchanted. When Onni materialised with his apologies for Tuuri’s ignorance, she turned to him and said “Can I get Pakistani too?”

He immediately gave her a long and detailed talk about how rude it was to point out anyone’s skin colour, and how she was going to have to get used to seeing people that looked different to her because this wasn’t Saimaa anymore, and not everyone here was cousins with each other, unlike their little town on the lake.  
He then had to go find Lalli, who had sneaked off half-way through the lecture. Lalli formed his habit of sneaking off in the early days, back before Tuuri was used to seeing people with dark skin and eyes a different shape to hers, and speaking languages that were not Scandinavian or Sami. 

Because Keuruu was so much bigger than Saimaa, there was a lot more traffic. Tuuri had never seen a truck before. She thought it was some kind of very, very weird cow and asked the driver how he milked it, which caused the man to laugh so hard he fell over and needed seven stitches.  
Unlike Lalli, she didn’t shy away from them. She enjoyed the oily rasp of the engines and the purring noises vehicles made when they idled, or, as she understood it at the time, ‘napping’. She used to stretch herself out on the hoods of cars and trucks and even the odd tanks to enjoy the hot, chemical warmth trapped beneath.

She became known quickly among the drivers which passed regularly through the area. They took to calling her ‘Hood Ornament’, which was shortened to ‘Hoodie’ over time. Few of them ever noticed her occasional shadow- her little cousin. When they did, they looked away.

One day, Lalli came home from school noticeably dejected, which was unusual. Normally, Lalli was not noticeably anything unless he was hungry or didn’t like someone in the room, who he would be apt to hiss at or even bite if they came too close.

Tuuri had not walked home with him- she had her own friends, for the gods’ sake. Was she supposed to hold his hand all the time?

She didn’t know what was wrong with him until he turned to Onni and said “Do I have to be a scout?”

Onni nodded “You do.”

“How come?”

“Because you’re gonna be a really strong mage when you get big.”

Lalli frowned and crawled under his bed, from where he held the rest of the conversation. He believed he was safe under there.  
“How big?”

“Sixteen, fifteen. You’ll start then.”

“But when will I be strongest?”

“I don’t know. I bet you’ll have good control over your powers when you’re twenty.”

“Can I start scouting then?”

“What do you want to do in the mean time? You can’t just sit under the bed all of your life.”

Lalli turned on his side to look at his biggest cousin. His eyes were narrowed “What if I want to?”

Onni shrugged “Hate to break it to you, but there’s more to life than that. You’ve got a responsibility to use your magic, Lalli. Not everyone is born the way we are.”

At this point, Tuuri slammed her hands on the table. She stood and glared at both of them “Thanks, Onni! You never once asked me what I want to be when I’m older!”

Instead of flustering with apologies like he normally did, Onni just gave her a stern look “Tuuri, this about Lalli. Not you. We’ll talk about your problems when Lalli feels better.”

Tuuri didn’t wait for him to finish. She stormed from their barrack and, for dramatic effect, slammed the door. The first time the slam didn’t go quite the way she wanted, so she went back and slammed it again. This time, the barrack shook.  
Satisfied with her efforts, Tuuri stalked off to the garages. It was the place she went when she was angry with one of her family. It was the place she went to read, to hide from her friends when she didn’t feel like seeing them and when she just needed a break from the world in general.

It was, in short, her place.

When she arrived at the garage, she saw a bunch of trucks had come in the night before. Most of them crouched there, looking sullen and tired, stained in their own oil and enough mud to pave a road. Tuuri had a thought, when she saw the door was open on one of them.  
When she noticed no one was among the cars at that moment, the thought got a little more developed. 

Checking there was no one around to see her one last time, Tuuri scuttled over to the truck with the open door and climbed up the steps, inside. She clambered over the dashboard and the steering wheel the size of her own head. In the back-seat, Tuuri found herself surrounded by boxes of documents and little phials full of soil, which were swathed in a soft, translucent fabric and packed up in even more boxes.

Was this a survey truck, collecting soil from across the country?  
Excellent, Tuuri had always wanted to see the rest of Finland. Keuruu may have been a lot bigger than Saimaa, but it was still only Keuruu. There was a whole country waiting for Tuuri to explore. And, beyond that, a whole world.

The truck set off an hour later. Tuuri lay in the back silent as a mouse for the first three hours, and was only discovered when the radio of the truck chirped to life and the driver was advised a little girl had gone missing from Keuruu.  
Did she see anyone by the roadside, asked the radio. The driver turned to retrieve a pair of binoculars from the mess in the backseat and found the little girl in question sitting between boxes of soil samples and pay-rolls.

The grin on her face was so irresistibly impish and proud, the driver let Tuuri sit shot-gun on the entire drive back. The view was amazing.

When she got back to Keuruu, Onni was waiting with about a dozen other official-looking people. Her brother clearly wanted to race over and sweep her up in a hug, but he had to wait for each of these people to lecture her about how she’d risked her home, compromised the good name of Keuruu by pulling this little stunt and how she could have gotten herself infected and died.  
One of them even gave her a light spritz of antiseptic, say, in case the Rash had somehow sneaked through the closed truck’s windows and sat lurking on her collar, waiting for the fortuitous moment where Tuuri might lick the exact right spot and become its host. 

Tuuri couldn’t stop smiling.  
Even when she was finally handed back to Onni and she saw he’d chewed his thumbnail bloody in the anticipation of waiting for her, and his eyes were blood-shot from crying and dark and baggy, she just smiled.

Exhausted, once they arrived at their barrack, Onni crawled in bed without saying another word to her. For the first time, Tuuri began to feel a pang of guilt.  
Obviously, she shouldn’t have done that. Obviously, she had ruined Onni’s trust in her and put him through hell for the six or seven hours she was on the poorly tended logging roads in the truck.

But she couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry for doing it. Only guilty.

Under Onni’s bed, she found her cousin. Right where she had left him. He hadn’t seemed to notice she was gone.

Tuuri grabbed the blanket from her own and crawled underneath, spreading it over the two of them. She stretched her arm out for Lalli to use as a pillow.

It was nice to be safe, she realised. On the roads there had been a touch of fear every time they turned a corner- overwhelmed by the excitement, of course, but it was still there to unsettle her.  
Here, in her own home, she knew she was safe.

“Tuuri.”

She was surprised. Lalli didn’t normally start conversations. 

“Yeah.”

“What do you want to do when you get big?”

She smiled “I want to drive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Young kids are all slightly evil and selfish. That was the inspiration for this prompt, anyway


	16. 27: Friendship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun gets a little bit drunk on a night out and takes the unique perspective the intoxication provides to appreciate her oldest and most best friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're the reader that doesn't enjoy drunk humour, skip on by this one. There's a little bit of swearing, but nothing sexually crude. It's just some Sigrun silliness, set in a modern context where they've got phones and she and Mikkel are college buddies and Sigrun is still a Norse pagan swearing by Odin.
> 
> Also, Emil is apparently a young part-time bartender, so feel free to imagine him with a ponytail, tattoo sleeves, skinny jeans and smile so dazzling he gets left entire wallets as a tip.

8:30 p.m.  
“I’m being forced to go out with the troops for the general’s birthday. Warning you; drunk Sigrun is about to come out. Turn off your phone. Sorry in advance for the crazy stuff that’s gonna come out of my mouth. I’ll try to make this my last voicemail.”

8:45 p.m.  
“Just did my first shot. I’m still ok.”

8:50 p.m.  
“I hate vodka so much. I’m switching to beer for the rest of the night. I know I said I wouldn’t- hey! Hey! Watch it with the spillage! Odin almighty, man! Anyway, I know I said I wouldn’t harass you with voicemails all night long, but everyone here is so boring, you know? I miss my main man. My wingman. My bestie. Are we too old for besties?”

9:30 p.m.  
Text from Sig: m now officially drunk.  
my hands r 2 big

9:35 p.m.  
“The bartender just put the moves on me. I told him I had a b-boyfriend, wow, excuse me, that was a burp. Yeah, so, so I tell the guy, right, that I have a boyfriend and he was like ‘what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him’ and I was like ‘yeah but whatever you’re trying to pull will get you hurt’ then I just downed a shot and stared at him, like, like some owl. I’m such a badass.”

9:50 p.m.  
Text from Sig: wrote u a poem  
I knwo this guy named Mikkel  
He’s scory as a bat  
And his mom is probably Hel  
But hes also kinda fat  
Fat and strong and fluffy  
his face is like a bear’s back-end  
But hes still my buddy  
hes my best friend

10:01 p.m.  
“MIIIIKKEEEEEEEL. WAKE UP. WAAAAAKE UP. MIKKEL MIKKEL MIKKEL WAKE UP I’M BORED. COME AND GET ME FROM THE BAR AND WE’LL GO BURN DOWN A BARN LIKE IN COLLEGE!”

10:02 p.m.  
“Whoa. I’m so sorry, man, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m so full of bullshit, but this bar napkin…this bar napkin has the greatest message on it. I’m gonna- I’m gonna bring it back. I’m gonna give it to you. You need to see this, this is just…this message would fix the world if the world would listen. Oh, damn, the boss is on the table. She’s losing it, man. I better get on the table. I can’t let her out crazy me.”

10:08 p.m.  
Text from Sig: I fell of th table  
I like ti ond th flrooror

10:13 p.m.  
Text from Sig: Stoled omeboby’s shoe. Its mine now. Thye want it back but I will hide

10:16 p.m.  
Text from Sig: the gods spoke to me

10:16 p.m.  
Text from Sig: it was the radio.

10:45 p.m.  
“Hey Kel. So, another bartender found me- ugh, ‘scuse me, hunched up under the bar clutching a high-heel. I was chatting something about Odin speaking to me through the radio. Little more sober right now. Just a little more sober. Gods, this reminds me of college. Remember that time I stole a trashcan from a super-market and said I was a transformer? I also remember you still have those damned pictures framed on your desk. You know how bad it is for our colleagues to see me walking around with a brand-new trash-can covering me down to my knees right? Oh, gods, I’m having such regrets about tonight. My hang-over tomorrow is gonna kill me.”  
I gotta get back in there. People are looking for me. I should probably give this shoe back.”

11: 11 p.m.  
“Am wasted again, I think? There’s this totally hot guy here. I’m gonna- I’m gonna do it, man. I’m gonna ask him if he’s single.”

11: 14 p.m.  
Text from Sig: About 2 do et. Gone ask hot guy 4r number

11:16 p.m.  
Text from Sig: Hot guy is my bf? Whn? 

11:20 p.m.  
“Mikkel! Why didn’t you s-SAY I had such a HOT boyfriend! I thought I was a single loner! But don’t worry- hurp- we can still be crazy cat ladies together! I’m gonna get five cats and I’ll name ‘em all Junior.”

11:42 p.m.  
Text from Sig: some1’s touchn m boob

11:43 p.m.  
Text from Sig: Is my jacket. Tsill hvs sho9

12:00 p.m.  
“Sigrun. Pick up your phone.”

12:01 p.m.   
“MIKKEL!”

“Where are you right now?”

“I don’t know! There’s a lotta lights, so, maybe heaven? Maybe I’m in a rave?”

“Can you pass the phone to the bartender? The one who gave you water?”

“Nawww is Kelly lookin’ for a wifey? Ha! She’s too good for you, man! She’s got, like, so much hair! You only deserve women with- with bobs!”

“Like yours?”

“Yeah! We’re scum!”

“Sigrun, give the phone to the bartender.”

“Fine! You don’t wanna talk to me? That’s fine. You need to have other friends. Can’t just be Sig Sig Sig all the time, man, or you’ll turn into me. Then I’d hafta kill you, ‘cos the world can’t have two of me. Even one is really hard on it.”

“…Hello?”

“Hey, Mikkel.”

“Emil? What on earth are you doing in the bar?”

“I’m the bartender. Paying my bills. Watching Sigrun set the world on fire.”

“Not literally, I would hope?”

“No, not literally. I got out the fire extinguisher just in case. She didn’t see me until she was already drunk off her face, and even then she didn’t recognise me. Not even when I gave her the water. She just sat under the bar with this leg-”

“Leg? She said it was a shoe!”

“No! She has a full-on prosthetic leg! I’ve told the security guys to do a quick check for anyone without one of their legs, but they can’t figure out where it came from! She asked me to hold it for her while she went back to the party.”

“Well.”

“I know, right? And she didn’t recognise her boyfriend. She went over to him and asked him if it hurt when he fell out of heaven, and she actually fell off her stool when he told her they were already dating. She made the whole bar look and held his hand up and just went ‘he’s dating me, can you believe it?’ and then everyone cheered and her boss ordered a round for everyone.”

“Is she alright?”

“Listen and you tell me.”

“…”

“…”

“Her singing is better when she’s intoxicated.”

“She’s using the leg as a microphone.”

“Alright, I’m coming down to the bar. I’ll take her home and let her sleep off her hang-over.”

“Want me to try to sober her up?”

“The drunker she is, the worse her coordination will be. I don’t want her able to walk straight. You know how aggressive she gets when she sees people on a dark street and she’s smashed.”

“Oh, yeah, of course I do. I was there when she threw that guy in the dumpster.”

“And accused him of being a secret agent coming to kill her.”

“Because she was secretly Superman. And Clark Kent was just an underpaid actor pretending to be her.”

“Sigrun has some problems.”

“Good thing she doesn’t drink too often. See you in a few?”

“Yes. Do you want a ride home?”

“Nah, Lalli’s picking me up in ten minutes. You better hurry up, though. Sigrun just decided she wants to climb the light fixtures.”

 

Sigrun wakes up the following morning in a dry bath-tub, dressed in a sports bra and a pair of swimming trunks several times too big for her.  
Her head seems to have been filled with ants while her guard was lowered. The pain is so fierce she is forced to put a wash-cloth over her face against the weak, sickly dawn-light coming through the smoked window.

After a time, she gathers sufficient strength to make her thick, dry tongue move “Mikkel?”

The door creaks open, as loud as thunder-clap “Good morning.”

“Oh my gods.”

“How do you feel?”

“Whose sports bra is this?”

“One of my sisters’. They leave their things all over the place when they visit. You were convinced you were a mermaid and you were going to die if you dried out, so I gave you some water-proof clothes and let you sit in the bath-tub. I see you threw the duvet away.”

The rustle of the fabric sounds more like a tree falling over, as Mikkel retrieves the duvet she flung off sometime in the night and spreads it over her, tucking each of her limbs inside.  
She hears the clink of ice-cubes in a glass and smells the familiar, bitter smell of the Madsen family cure for hang-overs. She must have drunk five of those every month of her college life, when she and Mikkel were house-sharing and totally inseparable. They are less inseparable now, but mainly because adult life conspires to keep them apart with responsibilities and other relationships, like the committed romantic ones which are so bewildered by their friendship.

“Do you think you can manage this?”

Sigrun groans, but reaches for the drink. The first sip is always the worst, even after over a decade.

“This tastes like if death were a vegetable.”

Mikkel removes the wash-cloth and tilts her head back, checking her face for bruises “You came off alright from last night.”

Again, she groans “I gotta stop doing that. I spammed you with texts and voicemails, didn’t I?”

“Yes. A fair amount. You also brought me a bar-napkin and,” he reaches behind him and produces a cheetah blade “This.”

Sigrun’s jaw drops “Where the hell did I get that?”

“Well you fell off a table last night, so I assume you found it when you were laying on the ground.”

“Gods. What else did I do?”

“Failed to recognise your boyfriend, asked him out all over again. Failed to recognise your protégé when he was sobering you up with water, and you were hiding under his bar with your…your leg, friend. The real high-light of the night came when we tried to get you in the car. You didn’t attack anyone this time, but when Lalli came to pick Emil up from his shift you were convinced he wasn’t really himself. You kept telling him to take off his mask and show you his real face.”

Sigrun knocks back another sip of the foul, green concoction “I didn’t hurt him, did I?”

“No, but you made him give you his scarf. You may not have noticed, but you’re still wearing it.”

Looking down, she sees a hand-knitted red scarf with a fringe of green at the bottom. Its wound haphazardly around her as if drunk-Sigrun thought it was a feather boa.

“Shit. I’m such a bastard when I’m drunk.”

Mikkel shakes his head, laying a sympathetic hand on her shoulder “No, Sigrun. You’re quite entertaining and affectionate. You wrote me a poem.”

“You framed it already, didn’t you?”

He just smiles.

“You jerk. Stop doing that!”

“I’ll stop framing the stupid things you do when you stop doing them.”

“Hey- why is the bathroom floor covered in paper?”

“Well you spent twenty minutes rolling and unrolling the same roll of toilet paper. You said you were fishing and got disappointed every time you failed to catch something.”

Sigrun notices something attached to the end of the unfurled toilet roll that warms her heart “Did you stick a paperclip on the end so I would think I caught something?”

Mikkel nods “It was the only way to stop you.”

“You’re too good to me. Too tolerant.”

He shrugs “I’m used to you. You and your…your leg-collecting. I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

Sigrun coos and immediately regrets it, from the sharp stab of pain in her temple “I wish you did dumb stuff when you get drunk, but you just sit in a corner and mutter about the stock market. You’re so boring.”

“At least I balance you out. Now, drink that up. You have a scarf to return, and we better get this leg to the police station’s lost and found. That is, unless you’re afraid you might dry out?”

Sigrun tries to throw her duvet at him, but the sudden movement and the pain it causes forces her to lay at the bottom of the tub breathing slowly for ten minutes, before she is ready to attempt to act again.


	17. 22: Mother Nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun and Tuuri have a problem at the same time. Mikkel knows what's up- he's got plenty of sisters. But Emil? Not so much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, if you're the kind of person who doesn't like to talk about it- no, let's not skirt around it...MENSTRUATION  
> If you think you may be offended or grossed out by the mention of MENSTRUATION then skip right on past this prompt and pretend it never happened. The language concerning MENSTRUATION is not graphic nor designed to be offensive, but it does concern MENSTRUATION and I understand some people just do not want to hear about that.
> 
> So, last warning, if you are offended by mentions of MENSTRUATION, then the warning light is on and this is your cue to escape. If not?  
> Then proceed.

Five weeks into the mission, something awful happens. Not unprecedented. Having lived with older sisters all of his life, Mikkel could easily have told the others it was coming. Having lived with Tuuri for the literal entirety of his life, Lalli could have also told the others it was coming. If he spoke a language other than Finnish. Even Reynir was faintly aware of the female phenomena that was coming, although his older sisters had all been out of the house for years when he finally got old and aware enough to notice something special happened to women.

Emil, on the other hand, as he is not a woman, has no sisters to claim, and nor were any of the adult females in his life willing to admit to the special woman problem or discuss it when it arose, has almost no idea what is happening when it happens.

One morning, Sigrun wakes up with an expression that suggests she wants to kill something with her teeth. This, in itself, is not unusual. What is unusual is that Sigrun doesn’t seem to enjoy her bloodlust.

Mikkel is the first to recognise the haunted, drawn look on her face and the awkward way she holds herself, so that she is slightly bent at the abdomen. His heart sinks. He has somehow forgotten that Sigrun is not just a woman, but, like, a functioning woman. She’s going to have these problems.  
He kind of just established her in his head as something completely outside humanity and its various biological oddities, such as the female tendency to bleed from a certain place to an upwards of ten days.

Ten days of Sigrun in unrelenting pain?  
No. No way is he going to watch that.

The moment she comes outside, Mikkel is inside. He reappears a moment later with a painkiller, which he passes to her silently.

“Thanks.” she grimaces, swallowing it dry.

They stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a slightly awkward silence.

“I have a twin sister.” mutters Mikkel.

She cocks an eyebrow “You do? So you’re an expert on this sort of nonsense?”

“On my sister’s. She grew incredibly irritable. Her strength doubled. She was able to lift a half-grown cow off the ground one time.”

Sigrun snorts “That’s not me, buddy. Your sister sounds awesome.”

Emil comes out of the tank, brushing out his bed-head and perturbed “Something is wrong with Tuuri.”

“What is wrong with Tuuri?” asks Mikkel, and in his head he is thinking, dear God, gods, whatever, please say it isn’t so.

As if in answer, a bugle of pain echoes from inside the tank. It spooks Reynir and the cat outside into the snow, Reynir still in his socks.

“Mikkel! I think she’s dying!” Reynir points inside the tank like it was a troll that made the noise instead of Tuuri.

Sigrun shakes her head “Does Freckles think she’s dying?”

Mikkel nods.

“Explain the woman-thing to him, will you?”

“I’m not going to explain the woman-thing to him.”

“Woman-thing?” repeats Emil incredulously “Are you sure? What if her appendix has burst?”

Tuuri’s full-throated bellow rings out of the tank “SOMEONE GET ME A PAINKILLER!”  
She definitely does not sound like she is dying and Reynir notices this with relief, though he has no idea what she has just said.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Sigrun jabs her thumb at the bewildered Emil, wincing at the same time “I’ll deal with my right-hand man over here if you tell Freckles what the deal is. And get Stubby a painkiller before she tries to chew her womb out or something.”

“Ew.” says Emil.

Mikkel sighs. He can’t say no to a team-mate (a boss, no less) in what is undoubtedly agonising pain “Alright.”

Before Mikkel can get to the tank, Lalli comes out. He looks harassed and tired, but in a comfortable way. He is used to helping his cousin through these moments, going by the look on his face. Without looking at the rest of them, he unfolds a towel and scoops snow into the centre, shutting it up again long-ways so it can be laid across Tuuri’s forehead, presumably. Lalli pivots on a heel (his feet are bare) and lopes back inside.  
As Tuuri groans from the bunk-room, he calls something out in Finnish. It sounds placating and comforting. But, since Lalli doesn’t seem to be one much for intonation, he could actually be expressing that she should die to save him the job of tending to her.

In his eagerness to help, Reynir rushes back into the tank with Mikkel. He is already babbling a mile-a-minute in Icelandic and sounds adorably concerned for his friend.  
This leaves Sigrun and Emil outside, alone together, unless the cat can be counted. 

Sigrun crouches in the snow, then perches on a flat rock and folds her arms on her knees. She tucks in around her stomach, grey-faced, and curls up on her side.

“Emil.” she rasps.

Emil goes to her side. He thinks he is about to be told to record her last words.

“Yeah?”

“You know how women have uteruses and ovaries and all that.”

He frowns “I am not totally ignorant. Of course I know that.”

“From books only, probably,” she mutters under her breath.

“What?”

“I said sit with me.”

Emil sits on the other side of the rock, giving her as much space as he can without toppling over side-ways.

Sigrun is relieved. She doesn’t have to explain the birds and the bees to him. Great. Someone in the Swedish educational system got through to him, somehow, and for that Sigrun commends them. Hopefully he knows what monthly punishment awaits the woman who does not make the intended use of her reproductive system.

“Are you going to sit up?”

“No. No, I’m comfortable like this.”

Emil examines her grey face, the sweat standing out on her furrowed brow “You look awful.”

“Thanks.”

“Is it really that bad?”

“Of course it’s that bad. It feels like I ate a woodsman and he wants out. He’s got an axe and a temper.”

Carefully, as if she might shatter at his touch, Emil pats Sigrun on the shoulder. When he hears no crack indicating he has broken his captain, he scoots a little closer.

What point did she intend to make with this? Sigrun tries to think rationally around the molten ball of agony in her abdomen. In the background, Tuuri lets out another plaintive wail for painkillers. 

“Ok. Let’s take this one step at a time…so…have you ever had any girlfriends?”

Emil starts. A little harder than he should at an innocent enough question “Uh, no.”

“I mean good friends who are girls.”

“Honestly? I’ve never had any good friends.”

This look on his face as he says this makes Sigrun want to punch every single person who attended his school and passed up the chance to make friends with him. Although she can kind of understand why. Emil is definitely the kind of kid high-school-Sigrun would have put into a trash-can and kicked down a hill.  
But that doesn’t excuse it. High-school-Sigrun was a jerk trying to over-compensate for her ‘how-the-Hel-do-I-live-up-to-my-parents’-reputations’ issues by taking it out on other people. She’ll extend the punching offer later, when she can move comfortably again.

“Ok. Well, have you ever seen a woman on her bloody?”

“Her what?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ve never heard it called that before.”

“Her bloody. Her time of the month. Her monthly subscription letter from the gods of fertility.”

Emil waves a hand “Alright! I got it!”

Sigrun sneaks one last one in “Her little womanly reminder. Yeah. They’re evil. And they make us a little bit evil too.”

“You following me?”

He shakes his head.

What does he want, a flow-chart? “Did you notice how I looked this morning?”

“Like you wanted to kill something with your teeth. But not in a good way.”

“Exactly. That’s because when you’re in this much pain for an extended period…” she lingers over the word, trying not to giggle in spite of her pain “You get understandably mad. I may be a little bit evil in two days. I’ve got a pretty bad one. I mean, I’ve been shot in the foot, I’ve had to have a few fingers stitched back on and figure out how to use those again, I’ve been kicked into barbed wire and bitten and punched in the boob and had my nose broken a few times, but nothing compares to this pain…it’s just…” she reaches for a suitably big and impressive word “It’s insidious.”

Emil ponders over this for a moment, then says “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“If I get a little bit bitchy, don’t hold it against you. It won’t be you or anyone else I’m mad at. It’ll be my stupid body.”

“Oh. But…but why is Tuuri having it at the same time? Isn’t that a bit weird?”

Oh, he is innocent. What a sweet-heart “Not weird at all. It just happens. When women spend time together, their-”

“Time of the month, I got that.”

“Yeah. That syncs up. I don’t know why, but it just happens.”

They sit in silence after that. Well, as close to silence as they can get with Tuuri complaining of her pain in progressively higher and higher shrieks.   
Maybe it’s just the unusually high level of hormones swimming around in her blood at the moment, but Sigrun feels she has gotten a little bit closer to Emil with this conversation. She was kind of afraid he was going to laugh at her, or to write her demeanour and physical condition off as drama, like so many have. The amount of times she has had to stop herself from breaking a nose when someone asked her if she was having her ‘little woman problem’ in the middle of a reprimand.

Seems a woman still can’t have a temper without having some kind of biological justification. But not on this tank. Mikkel is understanding- obviously, he would have to be, if he really does have a twin sister (not an identical one, Sigrun hopes) with a functioning uterus. Reynir seems more scared by it than offended or grossed out.  
And Lalli? Twiggy knows what’s up. Twiggy knows what’s going on. He’s been there, done that and he doesn’t have any time for hang-ups and gross-outs.

Emil’s hand is still on her shoulder and as she looks at him, she can see a thousand thoughts racing through his head; he is genuinely trying to think of a way to ease her burden until she feels better. 

Through the haze of pain in her organs, Sigrun feels a spark of warmth for her team. They aren’t a bad lot, all things considered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun topic, right? It's actually something that's bothered me- the logistics of it, in a post-apocalyptic world, how one deals with their menses? For, like, reasons mainly concerning the hygiene side of it. I just kind of assume the relevant hygiene products exist in some way.


	18. 14: Smile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is a commonly-held opinion in the tank that Mikkel Madsen does not possess the facial muscles nor the emotional capacity to smile properly. So, when it happens, and a laugh besides, the glorious most best captain is understandably suspicious.

What does it take to make a man without a laugh smile?

This is on Sigrun’s mind. All day. And all day it has bothered her probably to an unreasonable degree. When she and Emil returned to the tank after a long day of kicking infected ass, taking names and salvaging books, Mikkel was waiting for them on the doorstep.  
He reminded Sigrun of one of those old-world housewives, with his apron (disappointingly sans the frills) and the ladle in his hands, and it made her smile. Then her admittedly smug smile fell off when she realised he was also smiling- and had been smiling before she did.

What the Hel? Really? It looked like a happy one too. Not the smug ‘this-Dane-knows-something-you-don’t-you-ridiculous-loud-red-woman’ one he often wears and thinks no one ever notices.

Half an hour later, Sigrun is still looking at him out of the corner of her eye. That smile reappears every now and then. He’ll be bent over his work, wearing his standard, stoic expression, like he’s waiting anxiously for the bullet to the back that will part him from this mortal coil and its mundane tasks. Then that will break, the corner of his mouth quirks up and it’s there again.  
Sometimes it even comes with a little chuckle.

Sigrun doesn’t like it. Chuckles, from Mikkel? She would be less alarmed if he opened his mouth and issued a bear’s roar.  
But no, this is a smile and a chuckle. A giggle, some would even say, though she is not sure if any noise he makes with his so-deep-its-subterranean voice could constitute as anything as school-girlish as a giggle.

It makes her crazy. She wants to wander over and slap whatever secret he’s got out of him.

When Mikkel knows something she doesn’t, it’s never going to end well.

 

Reynir is faintly aware of Sigrun staring daggers at Mikkel as he wanders over to the laundry line.

“Want some help?”

A brief struggle flickers across Mikkel’s face “Sure.”

They work quietly for about half a minute before Reynir notices something which makes his entire face turn red as a strawberry.  
“Are you still thinking about that?”

Mikkel is trying not to snort “What?” he says innocently.

The flush reaches the tips of Reynir’s ears. He now matches the colour of his own hair almost perfectly “It wasn’t that funny, alright? I just tripped over.”

Mikkel can no longer contain it all. His face breaks into a grin which he hides badly in the back of his hand “And slid fifteen metres.”

“It wasn’t that far!”

“Into a snow-bank.”

“It was more like a small snow pile!”

“And kept going until you went out the other side. Leaving a Reynir-shaped hole.”

“Alright, that happened, but my braid did not leave its own impression! That’s exaggeration.”

“It did, Reynir.”

“It didn’t!”

“And then you couldn’t stand.”

“I tried, alright? The ground was very icy.”

“And knocked a tree.”

“We really don’t have to relive this whole thing, do we?”

“And a bird’s nest fell on your head.”

“It was empty.” Reynir grinds his teeth in frustration and embarrassment “Can you please not tell Sigrun or Emil? It…it was so humiliating. I mean, I didn’t even think Lalli could laugh and he laughed so hard at me he fell over.”

Mikkel lays a sympathetic hand on Reynir’s shoulder, suddenly serious again “Yes, that was unexpected. On the bright side, he only started laughing for real when the falcon came down to retrieve its nest from the top of your head.”  
And he cracks up all over again.

 

Reynir and Mikkel are so wrapped up in the events of the early afternoon that neither of them notices Sigrun’s glare narrow to a squint, as she reaches into her jacket and extracts a square of folded paper.

Underneath the only name on the list, ‘Mikkel Madsen’, she adds ‘Reynir Ar-something’ and underlines the newest addition a few times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the mutiny list grows


	19. 11: Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the winter is over, Mikkel has someone to visit. Someone who hasn't spoken to him very long time, but she's still the best conversationalist he knows. 
> 
> (major character past-death, so it may be upsetting)
> 
> Recommending listening? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBQd8sQVp7Y

“God, they really do let these graves go in the winter.”

Mikkel Madsen stoops and sweeps snow from the top of the gravestone he addresses. The snow is the crunchy kind, with the frosted outside and the soft centre of old snow from the night before. The cold seeps through his gloves, but he pays no mind.

The gravestone he addresses is a low, conical thing. It is made of grey stone which does not make a very flattering statement against the stark, white snow. The gravestone could be the blunted tooth of an ancient predator, dropped roots-down and left to weather years and years of beatings from the elements.  
Though it has only been ten, the stone has not fared that well. It is one which was made hastily and without much care or skill- really, just a rock hoisted out of a quarry and smoothed of its worst pits and scars, before it was planted in the earth to mark the grave.

Mikkel stares silently at it and the rough etching on the bumpy surface. 

When he speaks again, he sounds more tired than before “I suppose you wonder where I’ve been for the past few months. I told you before I left, if you’ll remember. Which you won’t, because you never listen to me. The mission was a wild success, should it interest you.”

A chilly breeze whips through the gates he left open and tugs lightly at the lapels of his coat-one of his uniform coats, to be exact. Mikkel has become so comfortable in the coats he decided he might as well add it to his regular wardrobe. No one seemed eager to take their uniforms back, after they met the Council.   
As long as no one stops him, Mikkel is probably going to wear this coat and the others like it all the way through the summer and on into the next winter, by which time a second mission will be underway. Better-staffed. Infinitely better-funded.

But the old team are all coming, if Reynir can get cleared by the mage academy up in Iceland.

He relates this to the gravestone, pausing to elaborate on Reynir “If you could meet them, I dare say you would like him the best. The boy is almost too sweet to be believed. The entire mission he was always underfoot- he was so determined to help me with the chores, dealing with him became a chore on its own. Would you believe I enjoyed the company?”

She wouldn’t. If she still had a voice, she would accuse him now of telling her fairy-stories to placate her. She was always so convinced of Mikkel’s general distaste for his fellow man (barring her, of course) that she never quite believed him when he mentioned enjoying someone’s company.

“You would like them all, probably. Even the Finn grew on me. He’s almost exactly like Piotr- remember, the boy we went to school with who would always look at his shoes when he talked? He got along fine with us. Not Piotr. The Finn, Lalli. He was very quiet. Didn’t hold much for sharing his space, except with the Swedish Cleanser, Emil. I’ll be annoyed to get back into a tank with those two, actually, if they don’t do something to resolve the romantic tension they’re doing their best to ignore while the rest of us suffer.”

She would accuse him of being a bitter, unloving old fart. From birth right up to death, she was always accusing him of being this and that, usually following her accusation up with ‘old fart’. It was her favourite insult and got her sent to the corner of a classroom with a dunce-cap snug on her head, countless times. 

“The one person I think you might have clashed with? Tuuri, our skald. The woman is just like you. She’s so young and seems to forget how young she is, and yet, she treats everyone like a little sibling to be manipulated. Remind you of someone? Well, I don’t think she means it. She’s just a young woman trying to find a good read. And our Captain…the woman is named after a Valkyrie, and believe me, if I hadn’t been assured by the HQ of the mission, that old fart Trond, I’d think I was being put into a tank with the very Valkyrie from the myths.”

How to describe the special kind of friendly, welcoming insanity Sigrun carried about with her? How to describe the way she fills a room the moment she enters it, so everyone feels the urge to bunch together and breathe deep to recover? How to describe how damned and simply happy it made her to kill a troll?

Mikkel gives it his best shot.  
If she were here and she could still touch him, she would drive a sharp elbow into his side, doing that infuriating thing with her eyebrows, and ask him if he’d made a new friend.

Mikkel has not made many over the course of his life. He had a best friend, born with him and sticking with him for all but the last ten years. And, really, the slacking off in the last ten years are not her fault.  
Death has a habit of running the regularity with which people are able to see each other.

But if she were here and if she were asking, regardless of whether or not she was doing the stupid thing with her stupid eyebrows, he would answer honestly and say, yes.

“I think this may be the best I’ve felt since…well, I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

He is quiet for a few more minutes. Even the wind drops, leaving a void of silence where it used to be. It would seem the entire, vast graveyard that surrounds him is holding its breath. Or it would, if there were any breath here to be held, but his.  
Soon, there will be. The commemorative day is tomorrow, and the families will assemble with ribbons and badges reading ‘Remembering Kastrup’ on their chests. Mikkel doesn’t much want to hang around people with nothing but good things to say about her. It irritates him, when her old, surviving colleagues think they knew his own damned womb-mate well enough to tell him why it hurts so badly that she is gone.

“I’d better go now. I’m actually supposed to be meeting said psychotic captain today. We’re going to talk with some new soldiers who want to go on the next mission. It’s going to be a task not to laugh in their faces, but for you? I’ll try to be kind.”

Before he goes, Mikkel lays his palm on the top of the graveyard. On the tip of the old, blunted tooth. He narrows his eyes and seems to listen, though the wind has picked up again and he really should not be able to hear his own pulse over it.  
But he hears something. Whatever it is, he is satisfied.

He turns and goes without a backwards glance.

And on the grave he leaves, the words go like this:

‘Indefatigable in battle, mind and spirit. Beloved daughter, comrade and twin.  
Mikkela Madsen  
Years 56-80  
May the memory of the fallen of Kastrup be carried in our hearts, always’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Addressing what you will know, if you've read me before, is quite a firm head-canon.  
> Mikkel has a twin sister named Mikkela, because with the amount of siblings that came before them, their parents just didn't have the energy for creativity. In this particular fic, said sister didn't make it off the base before Kastrup. 
> 
> I guess I felt it was time to prove to myself I could write something a touch melancholy, without the ridiculous, absurd humour dripping off every line?


	20. 18: Rainbow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri needs an informed second opinion on what she should wear for her big date (?). So, remembering her stereotypes, she reaches out to her gay room-mate. 
> 
> LGBTQ   
> (plus another one of those weird, vague modern contexts which are convenient to use for fun but confusing to explain)

At the tender age of twenty-one and five months, Tuuri is sure she is on the verge of something. Not true love. Not that at all, unless you count the self-love that comes from a long, arduous process of building up one’s self-esteem. She has come a very, very long way from that sad, chubby little girl who used to write ‘fat’ on the backs of her hands and refused to have a mirror in her room.

She is still chubby, of course, but thanks to a little bit of help from Mother Nature and her good friend Puberty, Tuuri has gone from being dumpy and adorable to down-right voluptuous. That’s her take on it, anyway.  
And this dress doesn’t seem to be disagreeing. She turns this way and that in her full-length, worried her ample rear is being squeezed weirdly. Once she has made the appropriate adjustments, she tucks her black bra straps underneath the tasteful cardigan she borrowed from Emil. It’s actually the cardigan he wears when the heaters in the university library are busted and people can see their breath, but she has let it fall open to show off her curves.

So hopefully she looks like an confident young woman all set for a hot date, rather than a cold young man who doesn’t care if he looks like someone’s dowdy maiden aunt if it keeps him from getting frostbite.  
Plaid-on-black. It works, right?

“Emil!” she bellows.

“What?” comes her housemate’s voice.

From the sound of it, he doesn’t seem to have moved from the couch where she last saw him, with a giant volume of H.P. Lovecraft in his lap and a bowl of complexion-wrecking Skittles balanced on his knee.

“Get in here! I need some advice!”

He groans. A moment later, there’s the flick of pages closing and the clink of hard candy on ceramics, and in shuffles Emil. He looks especially grandmotherly at the moment; he wears a knitted shawl draped around his shoulders and a pair of large reading glasses, without which his vision is so strong it would probably pass straight through the book if humans could have X-ray vision.  
Tuuri feels a flicker of annoyance, looking at him. Even in a grandma shawl (the one Onni knitted for her a while back, partly as a joke, partly because he needed an excuse to practice with his needles) and baggy study/reading PJs, Emil would turn heads. All of them. Stop some traffic too, while he’s at it.

He looks amazing pretty much whatever he’s in, because of that stupid, wonderful hair of his. It’s glossy, soft and blond and he was born like that. There’s just no way to achieve the follicular perfection her housemate has, unless you were born with sparkling hair.  
It’s bound up in a neat little ponytail and looks like it was styled by some Parisian expert.

Briefly, Tuuri hates him.  
Then she asks “Well?”

“Well what?”

She does a little twirl, which is not easy in her heels “How do I look?”

Emil shrugs “Good, I guess.”

“Really? Is that all I’m going to get?”

“You look good. Very…very plaid.”

A brave effort. More accurate than most of his judgements. Last time she asked him, he wasn’t expecting to be taken seriously or heard and told her she looked like a house-elf. It was a lucky thing for him that Emil has much longer legs than Tuuri, because he made it safely to the safety of his room before Tuuri and the broom could catch up to him.

Tuuri glowers “Ok, but what would you improve if you had to fix something?”

“That look on your face, for starts. Does Reynir know he’s being romanced?”

Her heart stops, then starts again and beats very quickly to make up for the time it lost “What makes you say that?”

Emil smiles in a knowing, exasperated way “For starters, that’s your froggy-went-a-courtin’ dress. And second, you wouldn’t be dipping into my wardrobe if you weren’t out for blood.”

A hand flutters to her chest. She wonders if it’s worth it to feign innocence.  
Nah “So sue me. Reynir’s a sweet guy. Better I get my teeth in him before you do.”

“Me? Me and Reynir? Ew, no. That’d be like dating my own leg.”

She doesn’t bother to ask him to elaborate on this “I gotta say, Emil, you’re being a very bad gay right now.”

He sighs. He’s heard this spiel before “Have you ever considered maybe it’s not me failing to fulfil my stereotype? Maybe it’s you. Women are supposed to be good at this, you know. Fashion and all of that nonsense.”

Tuuri turns and examines the swell of her hip under the dress- is it too big, or does it call just the right amount of attention to her curves?  
Just right, she decides “I am good at this. I just need an informed second opinion.”

“Well do yourself a favour and go find a good gay at the bar. Ask them how you look.”

“But you always look good! Use your expertise!”

“Tuuri, my expertise includes growing blond hair, pissing people off, bringing shame to my parents and drawing. If you want to bring shame to Onni, then call me.”   
With that, he pivots smoothly and stalks off to the living room. Back to his Skittles and eldritch horrors. 

Still, it was an encouraging report. Emil almost never says what he really thinks about the outfits Tuuri wears. He isn’t so good at offering up criticisms that are not also accidental insults, so he tends to avoid giving definite opinions while he re-trains himself not to be such a snob. The trick is to watch his nose. If it wrinkles, like there’s a bad smell in the room, she has failed the test, no matter what might come out of the mouth.  
His nose stayed straight, so she must be doing something right.

Alright, so Emil is gayer than a Sondheim musical, but he’s not unable to tell when a girl looks good and when she doesn’t.  
So Tuuri must look good right now.

She decides she had better get out there before the second thoughts come. If they catch her before she’s outside, she may be unable to leave the house.  
Funny how her confidence seems to come and go like the tide. Or maybe it’s her motivation to look good and feel good? She can’t really tell.

“Emil!” she announces, clopping to the door in her heels “I’m off! Wish me luck!”

“Good luck.”

“And you better pray a little bit for Reynir. You know how bad I am at flirting. Gods, I hope I don’t ruin our friendship.”

“You won’t.”

Which is apparently all she needs to hear, because the door slams a second later.

Emil waits until the sound of her determined footsteps has receded down the hall, then leans over the side of the couch and picks up the ancient hand-set. Before he can dial, the phone rings and nearly sends him jumping out of his seat.

He answers, trying not to sound like he has just been scared out of his wits “Hey, did he go?”

On the other end of the line, Lalli sounds tired “Yeah.”

“How did he seem?”

“Nervous. Does Tuuri know this is a date?”

“I think she thinks Reynir doesn’t know it’s a date.”

Lalli sighs in a combination of disgust and wonder “Those two.”

“Yeah. Hopefully they’ll figure out if they want to go out or not this time, so you and me, Sig and Mikkel, so we don’t have to sit in their stupid stew of sexual tension all the time now.”

“Are you ok? You sound shaken.”

“Uh,” he glances at the huge book in his lap. The Cthulhu stares back at him from the cover “I’m just a little spooked. Y’know. Reading Lovecraft. On my own.”

“Want me to come over?”

That saved Emil the trouble of finding a way to ask without sacrificing some of his pride “Sure!” he says, a little too quickly “Can you pick up dinner on the way?”

Excellent. A night in with his own significant other while their friends decide if they want to be each other’s’. There are worse ways to spend a night

But something plagues him “Hey Lal?”

“What?”

“Do you think I’m a bad gay?”

Lalli is silent for a moment “I’m going to be honest. I don’t even know how to answer that.”

He hangs up before Emil can elaborate and confuse him even more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Bad gay' is an accusation I have had hurled at me many times.   
> Well excuse me, friend, but I didn't know I was going to have to learn to wear things other than baggy comic book T-shirts and ragged shorts when the Gay Sorting Hat put me in Rainbowdor. 
> 
> Am I over-sharing? Probably.


	21. 37: Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun is forty-two. Good physical condition, sharp mind, two kids (and plenty of stretch-marks). Almost still perfect, except she can't see where she's going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not dead! Just slow, because work! Anyway, here's everyone's favourite Captain, doing her best to age gracefully.

Sigrun is getting older, but it takes her a while to notice.

At fort-two, the world is still as much her oyster as it ever was. Alright, so maybe she moves a tad more slowly and has on occasion been known to grumble about young people these days- really, though, the new, up-and-coming generation, they have no respect for the way things were done. She often remarks on this to Emil.

“I weep for the future generations,” she says, adjusting her cloak to block out the cold. Her skin has gotten just a little bit thinner with old age. Now, when she pinches the back of her hand, the skin is not so quick to spring back into place. It kind of hangs there, distended and crumpled. Reminds her of a chicken’s neck “Those kids I’m training? They take it for granted! The whole damned thing! Their fail-safes and their vaccinations. You know, they didn’t believe me when I told them it would only take one, nasty infection to bring down the whole system?”

Emil shrugs his broad shoulders. A lot about him has gotten broad. His mind, thanks to marrying a mage, his CV, because training under an Eide will make you the next best thing to an Eide, and his arms, strengthened from flinging around a flame-thrower all the time. His waist-line, though, has stayed frustratingly trim.   
Sigrun is in her top physical condition, but this condition now includes a bit of a paunchy waistline. She does not begrudge her kids for it. The twins are well worth a few stretch-marks.

“It’s hard to believe when you look at it now.” he gestures along the wall, where the town spreads out on one side, all wood and wood-smoke and polished glass, and the Silent World unfurls on the other “It seems so safe to them. Most of them haven’t seen a troll since they were nine or ten years old.”

“Most of them are greenhorns.” scoffs Sigrun “What’s wrong with seeing a troll or two? People are forgetting they’re out there! Honestly, these parents today. So terrified to let their kids see a troll that they pitch fits every time a school-outing comes to the edge of the wall.”

Emil cocks an eyebrow “I take it you’re not please I haven’t let Esteri tag along on one of your patrols yet?”

A point of contention between them; Sigrun thinks Emil is too protective of his daughter and Emil thinks he is not protective enough, what, with their other dad demonstrating just how much a daring (and foolhardy) mage can get away with if they’re good at their job. 

“She’ll have to come along soon. The girl’s got magic like no one’s business. The military will be throwing scholarships at her in a few years’ time.”

Again, he shrugs. Emil has learned a few good ways of communicating his disapproval without also offending everyone within a ten-metre radius “I want her to be a child for a while longer. She’s only six years old.”

“And yet she says things like ‘splendid’ when things go her way,” Sigrun laughs and elbows Emil in the side- which is so damned taut with muscle it’s like elbowing a spring-board “Esteri’s a good kid. That creepy prison-yard stare she got from Lalli? Yeah, that’s gonna serve her well in the hunting world.”

At that moment, a cry goes up from one of the sentry towers a little way along the wall. Someone’s shouting to open the gates.

“Ah, that might be our cue to go downstairs.” says Emil “Looks bad.”

Sigrun squints. She has no idea what he is looking at, as her eyes are fixe on the distant tree-line and she can see nothing. Nor can she see anything as her eyes follow the beaten path up to the front gates, until finally, she finds some indistinct shape scuttling along the path into the shadow of the gates.

“They’re wounded.” notes Emil.

How does he see that far?

Sigrun decides she will not bother to ask “Alright, let’s go see what this is about.”  
Her eyes are watery. Strong winds today. That must be it, ruining her vision.

 

Two weeks later, one of the twins slams the door. Sigrun looks up and shouts “Mads! Don’t slam the door!”

“I’m not Mads,” the blurred figure wanders down the hall, and when it steps under the light, Sigrun sees her daughter trudging in with a sheet in her hand “Don’t hate me for this, ok?”

“What? Let me see.”

She takes what is obviously a report card from her daughter’s hand and squints again. She squints a little harder. When the letters finally arrange themselves into something that make sense, Sigrun’s immediate desire is to pick her child up, holding her over her head and spinning her around and around, screaming ‘IF YOU BOTHERED TO STUDY LIKE YOUR BROTHER I WOULDN’T BE SIGING A FAIL IN MATHS EVERY OTHER MONTH.’

Instead, she takes a deep breath and says evenly “Brynhildr, we talked about this. We agreed one more fail on your math and you’re getting a tutor.”

Her shoulders slump, along with her face “Aw, but Mom! No one else has a tutor! I’m only eight! Let me be a kid some more!”

“Nope,” says Sigrun firmly “You’re getting a tutor. Either that or I’m going to literally sit on your shoulder every day until you’ve studied for an hour. What’ll it be?”

Brynhildr chews her bottom lip and considers her options “Can I have Uncle Mikkel?”

“No, you’re taking one of those nerds recommended to us by the school. If Mikkel comes over to work you know the two of us are just going to start talking.”

Brynhildr’s face turns sly “But it might be a good time for you guys to catch up. You hardly see each other anymore.”

Scoffing, Sigrun points to her left and out the kitchen window, which looks out over a fence and the side of their yard. And over that is the Madsen house and their kitchen window “There’s your Uncle Mikkel right there! Like I need him any closer!”

Her daughter peers curiously out the window and waves, looking dramatically miserable for her audience “That’s Aunt Sakura.”

Sigrun looks up and looks hard at the person in the window “Ah. So it is. Alright, child, I’ve said my piece. Go on up and read a book or something.”

She begins to sulk “I want to go to the park.”

“Alright, alright- and where is your brother?”

“He had to stay late for detention.”

She puts her face in her hands. Fifth time in two months. Once Brynhildr has tromped upstairs, she hears a muffled rap. Sakura Madsen is tapping on her own kitchen window. Sigrun gets up and opens hers.

“That didn’t look fun.” says Sakura sympathetically.

Sigrun sighs through her nose “It wasn’t. Bloody kids.”

Sakura flashes that sweet, soft smile that first put Mikkel at sea when they met “I’m sure Brynhildr can bring her grades up. With a little bit of bribery.”

Laughing, Sigrun rubs her tired eyes “I hope so. You know, I thought you were Mikkel when I saw you out of the corner of my eye?”

“What, really? You should get your eyes checked. Mikkel is so much taller than me.”

“Well you two do wear the same damned frilly apron when you do the dishes. Can you blame me?”

The two women share a laugh over the fence.

 

Reynir swings by on the weekend, a relatively raw and chubby baby mounted on his back in one of those ridiculous slings she sees young fathers wearing all over the place these days. For some reason mysterious to Sigrun, only the mothers seem to wear their babies on their chests, while the fathers have them peering over their shoulders like burbling little gargoyles.  
Still, Reynir is rocking it. And it helps that the baby underneath that heavy coat and shock of dark red hair is as adorable as can be.

They don’t linger on in the house. Sigrun suggests a park and they set off for a nice, leisurely stroll, among old friends and one new friend.  
Reynir’s Norwegian is actually Swedish, but his grasp of the language is comfortable. Nearing in on fluent, but he hasn’t had much time to study up, what, with Lumi taking up most of his time.

On the way to the park, they have a good belly-ache about the state the world is coming to.

“In Iceland they’re getting so desperate for mages, there’s talk of making all mages register. Mages without training, as well. Anyone with even a slight magical ability.” he tugs at the straps of the baby-carrier subconsciously, making Lumi grizzle in complaint “I don’t like this new head of the Defence Department. All of her ideas are just…kind of fascist? I mean, making everyone magical register? That doesn’t seem ethical.”

Sigrun nods sagely “Or reasonable. Lots of people would lie and just avoid the army.”

“I don’t know if I want Lumi to go into the army,” he smiles wryly “I’m turning into my parents already and we’ve only had her for a year. Tuuri says I need to stop worrying about the future and just enjoy this, while she’s young, but she has other things on her mind at work. All I have to keep my mind occupied is worrying about my little girl.”

“How much longer is your paternity leave, by the way?”

“Two months. I’ll take her to work with me, I think. For now, anyway.”

“I did it,” Sigrun laughs at the memory “With two of them. One on the front and one on the back. And one of them was always crying! They did it in shifts, I swear!”

They have to stop several times before reaching the park, to let a selection of people simper at Lumi and her beautiful red hair. Most of them seem to think Sigrun is the grandmother.  
She lets it go- they can’t really be blamed, can they? They see three red-haired people and judge Sigrun to be too old to be the mother, so that’s the next logical step. Still, after one old lady spends a particularly long time cooing at Sigrun about how wonderful grandchildren are, it is all she can do not to put her foot up the geriatric’s butt as she moves off with the aid of her cane.

Once at the park, they find a quiet spot, away from the teeming school-aged-children and the teenagers sharing ration cigarettes and the middle-aged and elderly couples take walks. Lumi is peeled from her father’s back and set on the ground. Reynir holds her hands- or rather, the woollen mittens they are encased in- and helps her take a few unsteady steps.

The sight of it makes Sigrun wish she had the means and the partner to make another of her own. Forty-two isn’t too old, is it? Uncle Trond didn’t have his first meaningful relationship until he was forty. Never had any kids, either, so Sigrun even has a head-start on him.   
She dismisses the idea.

“I think I’m getting old.”

Reynir, bless his sunny, freckled heart, scoffs immediately. He looks up at her with a fond smile “You’re only forty-two.”

“I think my eyes are going.”

Feels good to say it. Not so good to confront the issue, of course, but she was going to have to at some point.   
Reynir is a nice, non-judgemental party to admit this to. 

“What, really?”

Sigrun nods “I can’t see all the way to the bottom of the wall anymore. I mistook Sakura for Mikkel and Brynhildr for Mads, and I can’t read things that are close to my face anymore. Lost my long-sight and my short-sight.”

“Can you see us alright?” asks Reynir, hefting his baby as if she is some kind of light-house to draw her in like a lost ship.

“Yeah, I can see you fine. I just can’t see…” she looks over his shoulder and points out a mysteriously blurry shape “What the Hel that is.”

Reynir turns and grows excited immediately. He pops Lumi on a hip and waves frantically to the blob until it draws closer, becomes white in colour, and Sigrun realises it’s Lalli. Before his features become clear. She would recognise that skinny white shape anywhere. 

“Alright, that’s it. I need to see an eye-doctor, ‘cos from this distance Lalli just looks like a snow-man on a diet.”

 

Mikkel promises to be supportive. He goes to the eye-doctor with her when they get the problem diagnosed, then to the first few fittings. Now he is here when Sigrun gets to take away the finished product. In the waiting room, patient and collected as ever.  
The first thing he does when he sees Sigrun’s new glasses is let out a badly stifled laugh, converted into a kind of explosive snort. He gives her a hearty pat on the shoulder when he is finished doing his impression of an irritated horse.

“You look so distinguished.”

She glares at him. And, for the first time in many weeks, can see the familiar details of the face she is glaring at “And that’s all you get to say about me and the glasses. You get to make one snark at me and that was it.”

“Oh, that wasn’t a snark. You really do look…” he snorts a little bit again “Distinguished. Beyond a shadow of doubt. Very distinguished. Very mature.”

Sigrun’s glasses are slim, black and cold on her face at the moment. Those obnoxious little discs of plastic are cutting into the bridge of her nose and she has already somehow managed to get a thumb-print in the corner, although she handled them with glasses the entire time.  
The lens are strong and giving her a headache at the moment- she has fallen out of the habit of being able to see exactly where she is going, and it is going to take some time to get back to normal.

“Mature.” she repeats “Excellent.”

“Mature, not elderly. Don’t worry. You’re still a dynamic-looking woman. Beautiful to boot, I suppose, but my wife is more so.”

For some reason, Mikkel is incredibly smug about having landed such a beautiful woman as Sakura. He takes every available opportunity to remind Sigrun of how pretty his wife is. She thinks it is his way of proving that he can do something right and stick to something, as she accused him once, in the tank, of being shiftless and uncommitted and probably mutinous.  
His last job (a doctor, setting bones, diagnosing whatever sinister disease lingers behind persistent headaches and pinning down screeching children for their ‘flu shots and vaccines) has lasted eight years. As long as Sigrun’s children have been around, so hopefully Mikkel’s career will grow up with them, this time.

“Alright, so I’m no Sakura. But it doesn’t look too hideous, does it?”

Mikkel shakes his head “You look fine.”

“Great. Listen, these things are giving me an awful headache. Let’s go get a drink or something.”

For the first time in a few weeks, Sigrun does not have to hang onto Mikkel’s arm for fear of stepping into the gutter.   
It feels good to have her freedom back, even if it does come with a reminder of how she is ageing.

Whatever. Sigrun thinks she has earned the right to age.  
Wrinkles, stretch-marks, glasses and all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to invent your own theories as to how the Hel Lalli and Emil managed to produce biological child. Love conquers all. Especially biology.


	22. 30: Under rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nature is sick just like the humans, and the weather decides it doesn't want to be Danish anymore. A tropical, Vietnamese-jungle style monsoon is more like it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for women in a state of undress. Not nudity, but not that far from it. This is not for sexy-time purposes. This is for clothes-drying purposes and nothing else.

The word ‘cloudburst’ is a gentle one. When one considers what the average clouds looks like, the image of a puffy, woolly thing bursting is a charming one. What might be inside? Candy? Glitter? Perhaps kittens, which will then drift gently down to the earth into the outstretched hands of patient cat-lovers who are ready to take the little darlings back to cosy homes.

And then the real thing happens and all preconceptions of glittery, candy kittens are blown out of the water. One minute, the thunderheads just rumble threateningly.

Sigrun looks up long enough to remark that Thor seems to be snoring. Tuuri looks up long enough to be concerned- this is her first time in the Silent World after all, and her brother’s fear of the place has kind of infected her. She assumes anything which could go wrong fully intends to go wrong, just to prove to her that this is no place for a little non-immune girl to be messing with.  
Tuuri feels as if she is cheating. She shouldn’t be out here- this is Emil’s job.

Emil also happens to have a fever so hot Mikkel suggested he could save fuel by cooking breakfast on Emil’s forehead, so he is going to be out of commission for at least another day. For some reason, Lalli stubbornly refused to leave the tank. Or the bed-side of his sick Swedish friend.  
So Tuuri volunteered cheerfully, frantically and insistently until Sigrun finally agreed, on the condition that Tuuri shadows her footsteps exactly and doesn’t try to do anything on her own.

Reynir waved her off with encouraging words. Not a hint of concern about him, which was good. Tuuri almost wishes he clung to her ankles and refused to let her go. All she has is a rifle. He at least has some kind of magic that may or may not be imagined.

Tuuri is just about to suggest that they go back and replace her with Reynir when the clouds burst.

It is like a bucket fell from heaven and directly on top of them. Instantly, every square inch of her outer-clothes are soaked in oddly hot rain. Humidity comes in a sudden, violent wave and makes her nauseous.  
Gasping, Tuuri grasps blindly in the grey rain for something to orient herself, to lean on. She grabs something soft and screams.

It turns out to be Sigrun’s side. Sigrun grabs her by the wrist and leads her, patiently but firmly, into the shelter of a nearby building. In spite of herself, Tuuri strains against Sigrun. She’d rather deal with this last vestige of the violent summer rains in the rain, rather than inside whatever nest of sickness and horror Sigrun seems to think is safe.

But they stop in the foyer of the building. A dank ceiling covers their head, and a dull glass set of doors is behind them. A quick suspicious glance from Sigrun confirms that they are probably safe, because she can’t see any Grossling sacs hung up.  
The only downside is that they are now pinned in a heavy rain, with no way to see what might be coming for them.

Sigrun sighs “You can relax, Stubby.”

Tuuri’s teeth have begun to chatter. Not from the cold “Oh I can? Really? I can relax even though we’re in this Hel-scape and sick things could be crawling out of the rain for our gallbladders at any second? I can relax?”

“Calm down! It’s alright! Look, look at how heavy this is. Trolls do actually kind of need to see where they’re going, you know. At least the urban trolls. If we were by water then we’d be in big trouble.”  
She chuckles indulgently and ruffles Tuuri’s hair. Still short of breath, Tuuri feels a prickle of irritation; why can’t she just shoulder-bump her the way she does with Emil? She gets her hair fondled but Emil gets the easy, comradely gesture? Tuuri doesn’t think it’s fair. Well, ok, Emil has definitely earned Sigrun’s confidence and affection, but Tuuri still thinks it should be spread a little more evenly.

“What should we do? Just wait here?” she ventures.

Sigrun nods “Yep. Not much else to do. Unless you want to go out there and risk death.”

“No thanks.”

Peeling her bag off, Sigrun drops to the ground heavily and tugs at her soaked coat in disgust “You know, I was once in a little town with a team. It wasn’t that much- maybe there were 2000 people when the world wasn’t sick.”

Tuuri sits next to her and is aware of sounding like a wet sock every time she moves “That sounds like a lot of people.”

“Nah, not by old-world standards. They had millions upon millions in cities, normally. Thousands in towns. That’s why cities are always so damned infested with these bastards,” she gestures vaguely, as if the rain is some kind of troll “Anyway, there I was, maybe fifteen years old. It might have even been my first town. I remember I was sticking real close to the group. I was terrified I’d make a misstep and get us all killed. And some of the older ass-hats on my team notice how scared I am. I already proved I was willing to do stupid things to garnish praise and respect.”

Tuuri cocks an eyebrow “I can’t imagine you doing anything stupid for other people’s pleasure.”

“Well I was young. I didn’t yet know I could be awesome and stupid for just myself. One of them dares me to go jump in a pothole. It rained the day before, so the streets were a bit swampy. I find the nearest and biggest pothole I can and jump into it, with two feet. I kept going right up to my shoulders. I just barely stopped myself from going under.”

“Holy Ukko.”

“That wasn’t even the worst part. The ring-leader of the ass-hats comes over, ready to make nice and pull me up and you know what I did?”

Tuuri leans forwards “Tell me.”

Sigrun grins toothily “I bit the crap out of his ankle. Right through his boot. And they called me ‘Ankle Biter’ for months and months afterwards.”

Once they have finished laughing, Tuuri notices she is starting to get cold. With the humidity the cloudburst brought with it, one would think she would stay warm enough. The opposite is true. Something about the heat is clammy and unholy. Sucking the warmth out of her, and the soaked coat eagerly helps it.

She starts to tug her coat off, but finds her arms are stuck. She flaps helplessly for a few moments, to Sigrun’s immense amusement until she finally takes pity and pulls the coat the rest of the way off. It comes off with the sound of a boot sinking into wet mud.  
Sigrun can get her own coat off without help. The coat gives her an interesting hairstyle- something like a kitten whose mother has only washed one side of its fur, so it’s all slicked up into an awkward ridge on one side.

But she doesn’t stop there. She takes off her shirt too- in the middle of a Danish winter, Sigrun strips down to her vest and those weird boxer-shorts all Norwegian soldiers apparently wear. Then again, Tuuri supposes this isn’t the weirdest thing to happen today.  
Who ever heard of Denmark getting a random, humid monsoon in the middle of winter?

Tuuri is about to protest when it occurs to her this is exactly the kind of thing she came out here to do. Weird things. The kind of things she never thought she would- never dreamed she would be able to get away with.  
What’s the use of being in the dead part of her world if she can’t cut loose a little bit?

“Are you sure that’s safe?” she asks, although she’s already pulling her own wet shirt off.

“Oh, sure! You feel that heat? Of course it’s safe. This area’s kinda mild anyway. I’ve been in Denmark before, for summer-hunting missions and stuff, and it’s honestly surprising they don’t have palm trees there.”

Tuuri tugs off her trousers and socks, and then there’s nothing between her, the Silent World and what should be the bite of a Danish winter. Nothing but a bra and underwear and her skin.   
It feels great. Then, for a fleeting second, she is acutely nervous of being half-naked in front of a woman as trim and fit as Sigrun.

“Wow. How do you run with those things?”

She immediately relaxes “I just kind of fold an arm over them.”

“Yeesh. I don’t envy the back-pains you must get.”

They set about wringing out their wet clothes. For the coats, one of them takes the sleeves, the other the hem, and they twist in opposite directions until it becomes impossible to do so, or one loses their grip and whacks the other in the stomach.  
The trousers get the same treatment, but the socks get a more gentle wringing with only one pair of hands working on them.

When they are done, Sigrun is not satisfied “This isn’t good. You ever been in one of these before, Tuuri?”

“No.” it should be pretty obvious by now; Tuuri has never been anywhere or done anything.

“It’s going to get cold again as soon as the rain stops. We’ll both be hypothermic in minutes, if we’re still like this or in damp clothes.”

“Really?” she looks out at the rain, which is still coming down hard. She has a vague impression the streets may be flooding. It is difficult to tell, with the awful visibility “But it’s so warm right now.”

She turns back to Sigrun and finds she is fixed with a very weird look.

“What?”

“You seriously don’t know about this kind of stuff? You know it’s not just us and the animals that are sick. The whole world is sick. Nature is sick.”

“Oh. Really?”   
She has never thought of the gods, hers or anyone else’s, as the kind to take ill when their mortals do. She kind of assumed business was as normal in Tuonela and Valhalla. 

“Sure. Of course. The gods have what we have. A disease, trying to get into their souls and make them monsters. So it’s natural that the weather kind of messes itself up every now and then.”

“Oh. But isn’t weather caused by convection currents and stuff?”

Sigrun shrugs “Gods, convection currents. Same thing. One makes the other.”

Sigrun sets about constructing a rudimentary campfire-and-spit kind of thing. With dry wood retrieved from the front of the building (Tuuri holds her breath the entire time Sigrun is bent to the glass) and a slosh of gasoline from a little canister she had in her bag (why does she carry that? Isn’t arson Emil’s job?), starting a small fire. Just about big enough to cook on.   
Then over the flames, she makes a frame and drapes their clothes over it. The clothes begin to steam a few minutes later.

Tuuri remembers Onni mentioning tricks like this. Survival tricks he has taught Lalli over the years, in case their cousin manages to get himself lost. Most of his scouting work has been conducted alone, since Onni developed his acute fear of all things not located immediately within the walls of Keuruu, so a million things could happen to him.  
From the relative safety of their barracks, Onni demonstrated a lot of survival techniques.

Tuuri finds herself telling Sigrun about a time when Lalli was just starting out as a scout- maybe fourteen or fifteen, and she herself had just graduated and was waiting to hear back from the firm she had applied for. Onni had finally come to terms with the idea of one of his family leaving Keuruu, if only for a few hours at a time, and decided to cope by making sure Lalli could take care of himself.

He did this by staging surprise attacks.

Tuuri has to gasp for air at the memories- it’s so damned funny, she almost can’t speak. The fire has made the air hot and ashy “He- he kept hiding under beds! Around corners! He wanted to see if Lalli could see him coming! Every time he caught poor Lal off-guard, he’d whisper ‘dead’, like, Lalli would be dead if that happened when he scouted. This one time he got into the shower, gods, our shower was this tiny thing with a basin at the bottom, to catch all the water? You could hardly turn in that thing. So he pulled the curtain and lay down in it. Lalli comes home from a long day of training and turns on the water. He let it run to get it to the right temperature and just before he starts getting undressed, he looks down.” 

She has to stop and wheeze for a few minutes. Sigrun’s eyes are shining in the fire-light. She cannot wait to hear how this end.

“And there’s fucking Onni! Just, laying there, like some weird, fat näkki. He’s flat on his back and up to his ears in water and just staring. I come in to see what the Hel just made Lalli scream. Poor Lalli is bent over the sink trying not to puke he got scared so bad, and Onni was still lying in the tub. He looks up at me with this expression- this expression like he’s just killed a man and he whispers ‘dead’.”

They laugh until their throats hurt. They laugh until it devolves into that breathless honking, that slapping-the-ground-oh-gods-my-sides mirth that makes eyes wet and sides ache. 

Sigrun wipes her eyes on the back of her hand “Oh my gods. Your brother sounds amazing. I wish he’d come with us.”

With a sharp, unexpected pang of homesickness for her brother, Tuuri smiles “Me too. But he wouldn’t be happy out here. He has the worst anxiety about trolls. If he knew I was sitting out here in my skivvies? He’d flip his shit.”

They share another chuckle over this.

“Well your brother can rest easy. I’ll have you back home in one piece.”

Tuuri knows she means it.

Another two hours pass in this pleasant atmosphere. First, they exchange funny stories. Then Sigrun tells her a few horror stories and shows her a scar on her left hip, where her whole leg narrowly missed getting chomped off by a troll with some very angry, very active heads fused to the same long neck. Tuuri asks her if she’s ever wanted to have kids and they spend a good twenty minutes wondering if it would be ethical or advisable to name a child ‘Awesome Mini-me’.

By the time Mikkel turns up, they are in the middle of a scary story. It was inevitable. Predictable. There is a campfire and a mischievous woman with eighteen years of hunting experience. 

Tuuri is slowly pulling on her now-dried socks, hanging onto every word. They are just getting to the part where the murderer with the axe smeared with infected blood rounds on the defenceless young man when Mikkel choses to materialise out of the rain.

“And to think I was worried about you two.”

They both scream.  
Mikkel has to dodge the burning lath Sigrun burns at him, which sails into the rain and lands with a sizzling splat.

Tuuri grasps her chest “Gods! I thought you were an axe-murderer!”

“Don’t tempt me! Why didn’t you two turn back the moment the weather turned?”

Mikkel steps into the shelter. He is dressed in a long raincoat that makes him look a little bit like a stack of black rubber tires. His eyes are stormy in that unnervingly placid way of his, and his arms are crossed.

Sigrun beams at him, now that she has recovered from the initial spurt of adrenalin “What, and risk that visibility? Hel no! That brings up the point: how did you get out here?”

“I stuck to the middle of the road and avoided potholes.”

Her smile flickers “Potholes, eh?”

“Yes, potholes. The size of train carriages. I saw your fire from the road,” he points vaguely in the direction they came from “Tell me you found something before the rain started?”

Fishing in her bag, Sigrun produces a heavy, leather-bound book with a title out-lined in gold “It’s by that priest guy that used to interpret the god Cthulhu.”

Mikkel squints at the words on the back. English is incomprehensible to him “How do you know?”

“I know English, duh. All Norwegians do. It was our nation’s second language back in the days before the Rash.”

Somehow, Tuuri doubts this. She doubts Sigrun knows a single word of English, but someone will, back in the Known World. Hopefully that person will also be a worshipper of whatever pantheon this priest guy represents and dive on the rare find.  
In addition to that, there are a few medical, engineering and foreign-language textbooks, all in Danish. And one Icelandic copy of ‘Watership Down’, which Tuuri remembers fondly as the book that gave her a hysterical fear of rabbits.

Mikkel is placated by the finds. The Cthulhu book, especially, he has high hopes for.   
He has Sigrun pack them all up again and sits down, looking tired all of a sudden. His walk over must have been stressful “There’s no point in walking back while the rain is carrying on like this. The moment the winter comes back, it’s going to freeze you two to death if you’re soaked.”

“What, you didn’t bring extra raincoats?”

“We only have one. Tuuri, I don’t suppose you know how to make clothes?”

She shakes her head “Lalli does. He made almost everything I’ve ever worn since we got to Keuruu….what? Don’t look so shocked! Onni’s useless at it and the last time I used a needle, I stabbed myself under a nail. I’ll ask him about it. He won’t be happy, but he’ll probably do it anyway.”

They sit there in silence for a few moments. Tuuri watches the fire. Mikkel shrugs off his coat and closes his eyes. Apparently, it doesn’t bother him to be sitting with two half-naked women. Then again, if Tuuri remembers his anecdotes about Bornholm correctly, he has four sisters anyway, and one of them is his twin to boot.

After a while his eyes open again “Sigrun?”

“Yep.”

“What was that murderer with the axe up to anyway?”

By the end of the story, the rain has also finished. It get dressed and head back to the tank. Every time Sigrun sees a pothole on the way back, she gives it as wide a berth as possible.


	23. 70: Bound and gagged

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In an alternate world, the Hotakainens are contract killers. Emil's gotten serious enough with one of them that he needs to decide whether or not he wants a share in this business- this family business.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Non-specific discussion of murder and vengeance murder.

The first time Lalli lets him come along to one of the burials, Emil knows it is serious.

Well he knows it is serious anyway, but now he knows that the other Hotakainens recognise it- them, him and Lalli- for what it is and are accepting them into their fold. He’s pleased, of course. Worming his way into Onni’s good favour is easily the most difficult thing he has had to do, and he’s had to come out to conservative Catholic parents.   
They have only just begun to talk to him again after ten years. Emil is still toying with the idea of telling them about his partner’s family’s business. But, no, that is a lazy way to let his parents know he is no longer interested in repairing their relationship. He should maintain radio silence until they realise he took it to heart, when they said he could never come home.

The first time Lalli told him what his family did was not the first time he tried. Emil has thought on it and realised Lalli tried many, many times to admit his family’s unusually dark secret. When he finally scraped up the courage to get the words out without trailing off or pretending he was talking about something else, the look on his face was…well, it wasn’t a look. It was a dead man’s face. He knew he had done something powerful, and if Emil was not the man Lalli thought him to be then his entire family was going to pay for his mistake.

Emil had repeated what he heard, making sure he heard it right “You’re a contract killer?”

“We kill murderers. People who get out of jail for good behaviour. People who’re acquitted for dumb reasons. People that did it but don’t get punished. We clean up after them, if the families of their victims ask.”

They had been on the dock at the time, staring out at the lake. Their hands were together. It occurred Emil to wrench his hand away from Lalli’s- a killer’s hand, at that- and then he dismissed the idea entirely and put his shoulder to Lalli’s instead.

“Interesting.” he said “Here I was thinking you were a dendrologist.”

“Both. I’m both…is…is that really all you’re going to say?”

“Well it’s one hell of a public service. Good job, I guess?”

That also happened to be the moment that Emil knew he was in it for the long haul. With The One, or whatever they call it in Reynir’s paperback romances. His prince Charming.   
If Emil was apparently just going to accept that the…as Reynir would put it, the Love of his Life, was a contract killer part-time, he had better just marry the guy and call it good.

And they will get married, eventually, but not any time soon. 

Onni wants them to wait. He says they are too young. Twenty-two and twenty-three is the age to explore the world and meet new people. Whenever he says this, Lalli asks Onni if he’s so sure of that, why was he a sad loner in those consecutive years. Onni tells Lalli that not everyone can find their soul-mate on their first try.   
Lalli asks if Onni is acknowledging that he and Emil are going to stay with each other for the rest of their lives, then why is he saying ‘meet new people’ like it means ‘break up with each other and go have other boyfriends’ and can he just keep his stupid nose out of Lalli’s business.

Tuuri and Emil are usually off to the side on occasions like these, discussing the genius of Terry Pratchett and H.P. Lovecraft.  
They get along pretty well.

The first time Emil is invited on a late-night grave-digging run, he wakes up to the sound of a woman screaming downstairs.   
The house is a huge, and thanks to the old, firm wooden bones sound travels through the place like blood in vessels. Lifting his head from the pillow, Emil blinks a few times at the alarm clock. Three in the morning? Why is Lalli watching a horror movie at three in the morning?

Then he notices the screaming is a little bit too raw for acting. Emil has heard true terror in screams before- every time his Uncle Torbjörn is forced to confront his arachnophobia, when one of the leggy bastards has taken up residence in the bath. These screams sound like those screams. Except, like, with the added touch of an intense and well-founded fear of death.

Oh. 

Pulling on a sweater, Emil pads downstairs and pauses on the bottom, taking a moment to appreciate what is probably the weirdest thing he has ever seen.  
There’s his boyfriend- light of his life and all of those things- stuffing a dishcloth into the mouth of a woman in an orange jumpsuit, which is lightly misted with blood. It doesn’t help that the woman is tied to a chair. His reading chair. Tied to it with the cables Reynir keeps in their garage, for his rock-climbing.

As Emil watches Lalli tapes the dishcloth into the woman’s mouth and, scanning the room quickly, scoops up the bucket by the coffee table that Tuuri is using to hold her yarn. He pops this over the woman’s head. The muffled screams become tinny.

Only then does Lalli look up and see Emil there. 

His face is priceless “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“Is that the woman that burned down the transgender support centre?”

“Uh-huh.”

Emil’s mouth drops open “They let her off? What the hell? But she killed six people!”

Lalli shakes his head “She’s getting off on an insanity charge. The psychiatrist that diagnosed her for the court case? Old friend of the family.”

“Oh, man. What is the world coming too?”

“Could you hand me that other roll of tape please?”

They wait until the woman has stopped trying to scream through her dishcloth-and-bucket gag before untying her from the chair. Emil is not sure if reading there will ever be the same, now that he’s had a homicidal maniac in it.

Getting the woman into the trunk is no problem; they live way out in the countryside. The nearest neighbour is two kilometres away and the road that passes in front of their house is little more than a paved-over game trail. Emil opens the trunk and helps Lalli toss the woman in, among yet more of Reynir’s climbing equipment and a few crocheting magazines Tuuri left in the front seats months ago and has not yet reclaimed.  
She fits in quite nicely. 

Shutting the trunk, Lalli sags against it and lets out a deep, shuddering sigh.

“Tired?”

“Yes.”

Emil pats his boyfriend sympathetically on the shoulder “Why don’t you take a nap? Just tell me where we’re headed and I’ll drive.”

Lalli thinks it over for a second. Only a second, because his fried brain cannot manage extended periods of coherent thought. He hands the keys to Emil and gives him the directions to what turns out to be a very quiet, very out of the way place shrouded in a woods so old the trees smell the way Emil imagines the prehistoric forest of Pangea must have- all thick, damp mosses and the tang of old wood.  
Lalli instructs him to stop at the end of the road, from where they’ll have to get out and walk for a little while.

To access the special spot, they use a road approximately the size and width of a needle. All the way down Emil hears the various, prickly and creepy species of plants scraping at the car and thanks his lucky stars he doesn’t give a crap about the car’s paint-work. When you occasionally share a car with a woman who is more used to driving tanks over the rubble of ruined cities, you stop caring about little scratches.  
The criminal in question would be his former mentor and current best friend, Sigrun Eide. She’s a kind of mercenary that works for Doctors without Borders- a semi-legal, semi-secret member of staff who keeps the doctors and patients safe in warzones. She also, for some reason, has her own personal tank. Emil hasn’t asked about that yet.

Turning off the engine, Emil reaches over to shake Lalli awake. But instead he lets his hand fall to Lalli’s shoulder. For a few minutes, he just looks at him.  
He thinks very hard, too.

“Lalli.” he squeezes his shoulder “We’re here.”

Lalli opens his eyes and yawns slowly “Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Once out of the car, they pop the trunk and find their captive has passed out due to fear. Or something like it. Possibly even oxygen deprivation? That basket is a tight fit. Emil mentions this to Lalli and he immediately pulls it off and tosses it into the rest of Tuuri’s sewing mess. He mutters something incomprehensible to Emil’s average grasp of Finnish, and hauls the woman out by her legs.   
In a practiced movement, Lalli slings her over a shoulder. She groans in her fitful sleep, but does not wake.

He turns and heads off the end of the path into the woods. Emil falls in step with him, but takes care not to jostle the woman.

“So what happens now?”

“She dies.”

Emil stumbles a little bit. He catches himself on a branch before he kisses the dirt, however, and manages to ask “How does she die?”

“I don’t know. I won’t be there.”

Emil raises an eyebrow. Somehow Lalli notices, though the canopy of the trees is not letting much in the way of moonlight into the woods.

“What I mean is that we’re just handing her over. I am, I mean. I’m just handing her over.”

“To who?”

“The families.”

“Of…of the people she murdered?”

“And the few who got out with burns.”

“Oh. Well good for them.”

“For the survivors?”

“For the families. I guess it’s kind of old-world, but…”

But he is not sure how to finish the thought.

It does not take long to find the signs of a gathering deeper into the woods. Though they left no indication of their presence on the path or the outside, Emil can clearly and distinctly hear voices in several different accents. He can see a hot red light washing through the trees in the distance. It has to be a bonfire.

When they are about a quarter of a mile away from the noises and the firelight, Lalli says “Wait here.”   
He does this in a tone that leaves no room for debate.

Emil waits.

The voices grow in pitch at one point. Someone screams. Another cries.

And Emil waits.

He has spent a lot of time waiting in his life. When he was young, he waited for a sibling. And when it became apparent that his mother was not going to risk her figure for a second, after the first turned out so disappointing, he resigned himself to loneliness. When he was a pre-teen, he waited for someone to see that he was interesting. Engaging, or, at least, engaged. When it became apparent that no one would, he fell back into the habit of loneliness.  
And then when he was a teenager he did not have to wait. Someone saw what Emil wasn’t even sure was there, at that point. What he had almost stopped believing in at all.  
That he was a person worth some attention and interaction. Once it became apparent to this person, it also became glaringly obvious to Emil and he wondered why he doubted himself at all.

Emil waits for that person to come back. 

Lalli does come back about twenty minutes after he first left. He does not look any more or less tired than before. Just a little bit harassed. Dealing with the clients around the bonfire probably wasn’t the best use of his time.

Emil stands, dusting leaves from his jeans “Ready to go?”

Lalli nods “I’ll drive this time.”

They head back hand-in-hand.

“We really need to do something about all of those ropes in the trunk.”

“And the sewing magazines.”

“And the blood-stain.”

“…blood-stain?”

“Sorry.”

As Emil gets into the shot-gun seat, he tries to convince himself the air has not just become greasy and salt-smelling. Burnt-smelling. Like fat sizzling on a barbecue.  
And then he stops, because it doesn’t really matter. He is, after all, a part of the Hotakainen family now in all but the legal sense.

Which makes him a part of the family business of disposing of the worst of humanity, where others will not.  
Great. This is going to be one hell of a relationship, isn’t it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One message I want people to take away from this? Transphobia = very dumb 
> 
> And for a bonus message, murder Lalli is for some reason a very entertaining Lalli to consider.


	24. 58: Kick in the head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a half-drunken brawl, Tuuri gets a bad knock to the head. When she wakes up, there's an exuberant, adolescent seal following her around.

Grandma Hotakainen used to say nothing would clear the head like a swift kick to the head.

This was also the woman who thought it was a good idea to teach her grandkids to swim by tossing each of them into a troll-infested lake and shouting encouraging things from the dock while they thrashed, so Tuuri has never really taken her grandmother’s various words of wisdom all that seriously.

But there are some things she was right about. For example, Onni was going to grow up to be afraid of everything if he didn’t challenge himself. And most famously, her prediction that Lalli was going to turn out as a kind of silent spectre of a person, communicating in monosyllables and stares.

As Tuuri discovers one late Saturday evening, Grandma Hotakainen was also right about the kick in the head.

“Hey, lady!”

Tuuri turns, fully expecting to be facing a drunk. She is right. This man is alarmingly drunk.

She should not indulge him “What the Hel do you want?”  
Why did she do that? Has she no survival instinct.

The man staggers towards her. He is somewhere close to six feet and seven inches. Much taller than Mikkel and Sigrun, who seem like giants at the best of times. Tuuri feels her stomach clench in the anticipation of the smack-down that is to come.  
Clearly, this man is spoiling for a fight. Why he thinks he’s going to get that from a doughy skald-looking woman carrying a satchel full of books is totally beyond Tuuri.

“You know whatcher problem ish?”

Tuuri starts to back away down the street, which, as luck would have it, is completely empty at this hour. Neither are there any lights in any of the buildings. She’s going to have to rely on herself to get out of this one.  
It would be best to run. And yet, she can’t seem to run.

“What’s my problem?” she asks, the challenge in her voice coming naturally.

“Ya think yer safe. All youse think yer safe from- from the,” he pauses to belch “From the shtuff out there. You know whas out there?”

Tuuri doesn’t feel like explaining her unique and intimate knowledge of what is in the Silent World “Bad things.”

His eyes brighten with malice. He mimics her voice very badly “’bad things!’. Who shavshes you from these ‘bad things’?”

Tuuri wants to say she has always either saved herself or hidden behind Sigrun. Instead, she goes for what she thinks the drunk might want to hear “Brave lushes such as yourself, I suppose?”

Wrong thing to say. What happens next she will have to recall in bits and pieces. 

He comes for her. She tenses up and readies her fists. The next thing she knows, there’s blood in her mouth along with half of a thumb and her head is spinning.  
She spits the thumb out. Where did that come from? Why does it feel like she’s been hit in the head with a wrecking ball? 

Tuuri lays with her cheek on the cold sidewalk, contemplating the thumb. How did that get in her mouth? What a weird thing to happen.  
She wants to smile about it but the left side of her face is on fire. Moving it would not be a good idea. So, instead, she settles for passing out.

 

When next she opens her eyes, she is surrounded by familiar faces. All of them are concerned. Except for Sigrun, who’s slackened and dozing in a chair pulled up to Tuuri’s left.

“Tuuri!” shrieks Reynir from the bottom of her bed.

He stands to hug her, but Lalli gets there first. He has to crawl over Emil to do it. 

In spite of the pounding pain in her head, Tuuri is touched by the gesture.

“I’m ok,” her voice is hoarse. Lalli doesn’t say a word. He just lays down by her side, his arms around her neck.

“You most certainly are not. You were kicked in the face.” says Mikkel with that stiffness he has when he is angry- not with her, obviously “Your cheek was torn open and half of your eye-socket collapsed. It’s a good thing Mora is infested with competent healers, or you’d be in pain for a lot longer than you are already going to be. And on top of that?” Mikkel reaches over and lifts Sigrun’s limp arm by the wrist, showing Tuuri some bruised and scraped knuckle “Sigrun popped a knuckle out of joint when she was beating up your attacker.”

Tuuri frowns. Her mouth tastes like antiseptic at the moment, but there is still a kind of fleshy after-taste too “Did I bite his thumb off, or did I make that up?”

Emil smiles “No, you bit his thumb off. Good job, by the way.”

She is about to thank him when something stops her. By now, Reynir has risen to give her a hug. There is something behind him. Something which really doesn’t belong in a hospital room.

“Why is there a seal in here?” asks Tuuri, pointing.

Everyone looks, but only Reynir and Lalli see it.

“Oh.” says Lalli flatly “Ok.”

“Tuuri! You told me you weren’t a mage.”

Her head pounds. The seal stares back at her, calm as can be. It’s made of light, actually, so it’s not really a seal. More like a strong impression of blubber and fins traced out in embers.

“I guess I am now.”

 

Onni is mad when he hears, of course. He vacillates between telling Tuuri she was stupid for not running at her top speed and commending her for biting off the guy’s thumb. It helps that Sigrun tracked down the drunk and gave him a piece of her mind. The first time Onni comes to see her in hospital, Sigrun has to spend a long time convincing him of that.  
It is only when Sigrun explains she popped a knuckle out of joint in the process that Onni calms down enough to notice there is a seal in the room.

He gives the seal a strange look. It sits in the corner, its tail slapping the ground enthusiastically. Because Tuuri is overjoyed to see her big brother the seal seems to be overjoyed as well. Onni spends a few minutes looking between the glowing seal and his beaming sister.

Lalli gets sick of this pretty quickly “It’s Tuuri’s.”

“Tuuri isn’t a mage.”

“She got kicked in the head and now she is.”

Onni, as he is apt to do in moments of extreme shock, faints dead away onto the ground. Sigrun catches him before he can clang his head on the floor.

She wrinkles her nose in slight disgust “Are you sure this guy’s your brother?” 

“Of course! He just…he hasn’t got that strong a stomach for shock, you know?”

 

In two months, Tuuri is better. Her head still gives her trouble in the early mornings- pangs of pain when she stoops over a sink to brush her teeth, and the knot of scar tissue just behind her left temple makes sure she knows every time her hairbrush bumps it. She has a scar where the man’s boot met her head that runs along her eye-socket and ends at her chin. In a certain light, the scar even looks like a boot-print.  
Mikkel told her it makes her look brave and accomplished. Sigrun is slightly jealous, and Emil’s had a bit of a paradigm shift from considering the little chip out of his right eyebrow to be the worst facial scar possessed among his friends.

It is a little distracting to have a seal following her around all of the time. And even more so that she is the only one who can see it. Plastering its fat face against windows to watch passers-by on the streets and barking back at the dogs that seem to yip at empty space when they see her, and slapping its fins together whenever Tuuri smiles and rolling onto its side with a plaintive whine when Tuuri frowns. 

Tuuri definitely never expected to have to share her bath-times with a seal. On the bright side her seal has no physical body. It can frolic in the water all it wants without worrying about squishing Tuuri up against the walls.

For the next month, Tuuri does not think about her seal that much. She is only aware of being very pleased to have finally summoned up her own luonto. Finally! The magic that runs so thick in the Hotakainen blood is hers too! Even if it did take a swift kick in the head to get it to manifest. She also enjoys being able to look at her family’s luontos.  
Lalli’s is a lynx. Lithe and quiet like him, and it tends to shadow Emil with an unguarded look of affection on its glowing face. That, Tuuri has never seen Lalli do but she supposes some things are impossible hide when one’s soul is manifested.

Onni’s is an owl. An owl with his hair and his steely glares and his puffy, stoic shape. Tuuri thinks it’s adorable, even if it does spend the majority of its idle time perching in high places and giving judgemental looks.

The more time Tuuri spends watching their luontos at work or at play, the more she realises she needs to do the same. Her seal is of an average size. Conversely, the owl’s wingspan shadows an entire room when they spread, and the lynx’s head is up to Mikkel’s shoulder.  
Her family are experienced and accomplished and competent. And what is she? She’s a very, very smug woman with a seal barely bigger than a pup lolloping after her.

That needs to change.

“They grow bigger with experience,” explains Onni when she brings it up one day. He points to Lalli, who’s practicing some kind of spell with the lynx dozing behind him “See how big his is now? It was much smaller before you went on your…your mission to the Silent World.”

“What do I need to do to train mine?” she asks.  
They are in the foothills of Keuruu. The town smokes sullenly in the distance, smelling of wood-fire and machine oil. None of them are too concerned about the Silent World’s border behind them. What kind of troll could scare three mages?

“You need to get into training, for a start. Maybe at the mage academy in Iceland.”

“Isn’t that only for Icelandic mages?”

“Hel no! That’d be racist! No, they have two departments. One is for Norwegian and Icelandic mages and the other is for Finnish mages. There are a lot of similarities between the two, you know. We just use different gods.”

Tuuri toys with the idea of leaving her life in Keuruu behind for a jet-setting, thrilling life of magic and adventures and fattening her seal up.  
The seal claps its fins together and bugles with excitement.

Tuuri grins “How soon can I leave for Iceland?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri would make an awesome mage, wouldn't she? She'd look good in the mage-poncho thing they have. She'd be good at spinnning up some sick beats in Kalevala meter. She'd be good at over-exerting herself and sleeping for days. 
> 
> Just like her family!


	25. 31: Flowers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir has covered his haven in flowers. He's got flowers he has never seen in real life before, so adding some animals to that too shouldn't be so hard, right?  
> Lalli doesn't think so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I finally figured out the fandom term for those magey places is 'haven'.

Reynir has always loved flowers. 

As a child, he spent all of his time making flower-chains and ambushing his parents with nosegays. He loved to wear them in his hair and he loved to make other people wear them in their hair- by force, if necessary. When winter rolled in, Reynir spent most of his time thinking about how hard it was to wait for spring and for the bounty it brought.

He basically took up shepherding so he could be out in nature. Sit in the flowers, contemplating the clouds and the meaning of life and call it a job? Yes please! Of course there was always the odd occasion where he had to fight off a rabid dog with his crook or give a rustler a good whack, but for the most part, shepherding really was all sunshine and flowers.

So it seems natural Reynir’s love of the natural, petal-ed world would carry over into his haven.

To him anyway, but Lalli is scandalised.

He shows up in Reynir’s haven a few short minutes after the tank has gone silent for the night. He cannot speak. He does not move. For a moment he just stands there with his mouth open slightly.

Reynir springs up to greet him “Hey, Lalli! I think I finally got my haven figured out! You know, the borders are solid now and I know where to cast the protective runes and spells and stuff! Isn’t that great?”

“What is this?”

“It’s my haven,” says Reynir, confused “Are you ok?”

“No.” Lalli gestures around the haven “What’s with the flowers?”

“What do you mean?”

“Looks like a fertility god blew up in here.”

It is always strange to talk to Lalli. Reynir has been in the tank for three months now and never heard a full sentence out of Lalli- except for one time, when he apparently wanted to tell Tuuri she had accidentally tucked her shirt into the waistband of her underwear. And yet when he gets into the havens, he’ll talk a little bit. Not a whole lot. Not about that much either.  
Still, he talks. There are even occasional glimpses of a neglected and subtle sense of humour, which unsettles Reynir the most- he can’t explain it, but it just seems like Lalli shouldn’t really have one of those.

This time, however, Reynir has to hand it to him. His haven is very…flowery…today.

Reynir tries not to look put-out “Is there something wrong with it?”

Lalli shrugs.

“I just really like flowers.”

Though it may be overkill to have them bursting from every available surface. The craggy hillside that is Reynir’s haven has been decked out in the vibrant colours of spring. Even the boulders in the hillside are blooming with moss, dotted with little white and purple buds. The sheep are all having a time of it getting at the grass through the flowers, but they aren’t going to starve. Reynir thinks. Yeah, no, they should be fine.  
Creepers hang from the cliff where the ceiling of his haven approximately starts. The protective dome of energy, at least, that keeps spirits and the like from sneaking in to smash his face.

“And I thought, hey, if I have to isolate my mind somewhere, why don’t I make it somewhere nice? This is like the world’s best fort, right?”

At his words, a few creepers of flowering ivy spring up under his feet. Reynir rolls back on his heels and lets the plants spread of their own accord. Watching as the creepers grow rapidly past him, Lalli frowns.  
“You change your environment?”

“What, you don’t?”

He shakes his head “I don’t. I leave it the way I found it.”

Reynir considers this “I guess your place is pretty nice.”

“Why would you change yours?”  
Lalli crouches and flicks the head of a blooming lily. The lily bobs back and forth energetically on its stalk.

Sitting opposite him in the grass, Reynir pulls up a handful of long-stemmed daisies and starts pushing his thumbnail through, then threads the next stem through and repeats the process “Why not? I like flowers. I like feeling safe where I am, and having these everywhere makes me feel safe. I even made up some of the stuff that’s really rare these days. Those foreign plants that only the private collectors have. Look, I made an orchid bush.”

Lalli looks “I’m not a botanist, but I don’t think those grow on bushes.”

Reynir grins “They do now. Want to see if I can make an apple bush?”

“Those don’t grown on bushes.”

Closing his eyes, Reynir concentrates. He thinks of red skins and crisp tastes and of the time his sister tried to toss him one and instead hit him square between the eyes with it and knocked him into a ditch at the side of the road. He thinks of the scar he still has from the experience.

Lalli lets out a noise kind of like a mewl and, for the first time since Reynir popped out of the rations crate, grabs Reynir’s arm. He jolts him out of the vision- if only from the shock of actually making physical contact. Reynir was beginning to think Lalli was allergic to all humans except Emil and his cousin.

“What!”

“That!” Lalli points.

About a dozen feet away in the place where Reynir meant to make his apple bush floats an open wound. An open wound attached to nothing but the air. A layer of skin is spilt over tissue and the red, jellied tissue is punctured and glistening.

“What the Hel is that?” demands Lalli.

“My leg!”

“Your…your leg?”

Reynir sticks his leg out and rolls up the sleeve of his trousers. He twists it to the side and shows Lalli a long and livid scar on the back of his calf “See? I fell into a ditch when I was a kid and cut my leg open. I think about that every time I think about apples.”

“That,” Lalli points to the disembodied wound “Is why I don’t try to change my space. Weird things happen. Will you put that away?”

“I don’t know how to make it go away.”

“Not that. Your leg.”

“Oh, sorry.”   
Apparently Lalli doesn’t like having other people’s limbs thrust under his nose. Can’t say Reynir blames him on that one.

“So, how do I make it go away?”

“Envision something else. Something normal. Stick with plants.”

“Nuts to that! This is amazing! Let me try something else.”

Reynir squeezes his eye shut. In one ear, Lalli is trying to snap him out of it.

“Don’t.”

He thinks of black and white.

“Stop it.”

He thinks of animals that are black and white. Animals he has never seen in real life before.

“Reynir, stop it.”

Penguins. Penguins are good. Mysterious and far-flung in the world. Reynir has never seen one of those before.

“You did something weird again.”

He opens his eyes and scans the flowers for his creation. Frowning, Reynir stands. He doesn’t see a thing.

“It’s there.” Lalli gestures at what appears to be a crumpled blanket.

 

Reynir steps a little closer, his stomach knotted. Instead of creating the tall, black and white penguin he was going for, Reynir has conjured up a deflated sac of penguin-coloured flesh, in the shape of a deflated penguin.

“Huh?”

“I told you not to do it.”

“Did…did I kill it?”

“No. It was never alive.”

“But- but I managed to make all these flowers! And my own wound floating in mid-air! How come this is different?”

Lalli shrugs “Start small, I guess. I don’t mess with this stuff.”

It occurs to Reynir that his open wound is still floating around, like a balloon searching for an owner. He squints at it and imagines the wound sealing up. It does. In a kind of zipping motion, the wound sucks in on itself and disappears with a faint pop.   
He squints and the penguin. It bursts into flames. These flames do not spread. They just eat up the penguin skin and disappear when nothing is left.

Reynir swallows hard “Maybe I should stop for now.”

“You think?”

 

The next morning, Reynir wakes up with a headache. It would put him in a foul temper if he was in the habit of having a temper. But because Reynir is about as mild and pleasant as the sheep he grew up watching over, he just smiles a tad more weakly than usual. He tries to catch Lalli’s eyes a few times. Lalli is not at all interested in rehashing what happened in the haven.  
Never mind they’ve lost the common language of the havens, so wouldn’t be able to understand a word of what the other one said anyway.

With the headache eating away at his temples, Reynir isn’t sure he would have the energy to talk to him anyway, let alone mime out that he wants to try materialising a penguin again. He’ll talk to him again tonight.

Reynir has just finished helping Mikkel hang up the laundry when he feels a hand in his hair. He looks over his shoulder to find Lalli fixing a snow-drop to the first cross-section of his braid.

He smiles, wincing at the pain in his head “Thanks.”

Lalli nods and stalks off in the direction of the woods. Time to scout.

Reynir notices Emil is giving him a funny look. Or rather, has a weird look on his face, like he has just been slapped with a pot. He looks between him and the retreating Lalli again and again. Each time he is less bewildered and a more hurt.

Reynir wishes he had a way to assure Emil it is not what he thinks it is, but all he can do is smile at him and wave his hand dismissively. And, in the hopes that his headache will go away, he thinks of flowers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor deflated penguin. This is why you should always listen to sceptical Finns. They are the voice of reason.


	26. 26: Tears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mikkel does something that makes everyone cry. The cat included.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A.K.A. Mikkel finds a smoke-bomb

On a chilly weekday morning, Mikkel almost blows up the tank.

In a sense he does blow up the tank, but not so that the windows crumple out and the roof flies off in chunks and his smoking corpse flies out the door like it has a magnet in its back, drawing it inexorably towards the woods at the tank’s back.  
Instead, he blows it up with a gas. The gas explodes out of the cartridge and fills every cubic centimetre of the tank in a few seconds.

Luckily for Mikkel, he had the foresight to fish out one of the spare masks (in case Tuuri or Reynir happened to crack their masks by head-butting the ground or running into a wall or something) and strap it on before tampering with the strange device he found rolled underneath the bunks. Unfortunately for Mikkel, he did not have the foresight to find a pair of goggles. He is pretty sure Emil should be wearing them each time he sets something on fire to protect his sight. He is thinking, as the smoke spews from the fist-sized device under Tuuri’s bunk, about how much he hates Emil for not wearing his Cleanser goggles openly so Mikkel knew to fetch it off the belt hanging over the back of the driver’s seat before he went and poked this strange thing under the bunk.

He is also thinking about the time his sisters- the biggest, and by extension, the meanest- picked him up by the ankles and tossed him into a barrel of chopped onions, outside a barrack kitchen. They sat on the lid and laughed while his eyes stung, and the fumes rose around him, until they began to smother him and he passed out. They got him out, after realising he wasn’t inventing clever death-threats beneath them anymore. He smelled like onions and anger for a few days afterwards.

This time, Mikkel is not an indignant eight-year old. He is a fully grown man approximately the size of a runtish grizzly and has strength roughly proportional to that size. So, it is no huge task to get up and get the Hel out before the smoke chokes him completely.  
On the downside, his eyes do not seem to have gotten the message that he’s strong and should be able to shake this off. His eyes have regressed into his childhood. His eyes are in an outraged eight-year-old’s head again, weeping profusely as said eight-year-old begins to wonder if he will drown in sliced onions.

When he gets outside, he sucks in a deep, clean breath of winter air and tastes the chemical soot at the back of his mouth. Not good. Chemical burns or sickness or breath that smells like a chimney. Not caring if he is being watched (or able to see if it is so), Mikkel stoops, intending to scrub some snow in his face, and finding that he does not care to stand anymore, drops to his knees, then flat on his face, and just rolls around in the cleansing snow for a few minutes.

After his skin has stopped feeling as baked as an over-cooked chicken’s, Mikkel rises to his knees and sets about washing his face properly. It takes five handfuls of snow before he can see without a grey film stretched over his eyes. 

“Oh my gods. I killed the cat.”

Where is the cat?  
He didn’t kill it, did he? No. No that would be too cruel. Choking a little kitten on smoke? Mikkel doesn’t think he’d be able to bear it if he did that.

Straightening up, he calls for her. Over himself he can hear Sigrun saying some foul things- what he assumes are foul things anyway, since she has switched into her second language. English sounds weird to him but the sounds of curses are unmistakable in any language.

Just when Mikkel is starting to think he may be the worst person on the planet, he feels something soft brush his leg. Then little claws sink into the sleeve of his trousers and a cat rapidly scales his leg, to perch on his shoulder, her tail standing to attention and twice as fat as usual.

Mikkel reaches around and pets her gently on the top of the head “You have no idea how glad I am to see you.”

Kitty is a little bit sooty. Her fur is ruffled. Her eyes are wide and trembling. Her claws have actually punctured his skin, but doesn’t mind. At least she isn’t hurt.

Sigrun, on the other hand.

Through streaming eyes, Mikkel watches the captain grip the side of the tank, coughing tremendously, and scrub her eyes in a handful of snow too.   
She seems to be trying to shout something. But the smoke in her throat is getting in the way and, thanks to the deluge of tears coming down her cheeks too, she can’t see what she’s doing.

Finally she gets it out “Mikkel! What the Hel did you do?”

“Smoke bomb!” he answers.

She blinks snow form her lashes, growling in what is either pain or a promise to tear his head off. Possibly both. 

“Why?!” she roars.

“I didn’t know it was one when I poked it!”

“Who do I kill for this?”

“I don’t know!”

Again, she roars, and face-plants into the snow.  
Like he did just a moment ago, Sigrun rolls around in the snow. While she is doing this, Tuuri comes around the side of the tank and nearly trips over her prostrated captain. She sees the mouth of the tank smoking like a dragon. Tuuri tries to say something. Her eyes start to weep. She coughs raggedly and whips a hand in front of her face.

“What the Hel?”

“It was a smoke bomb.”

Tuuri tugs her collar up over her nose “Why- why is there a smoke bomb? Why’d you set it off?”

“Well I didn’t intend to.” he retorts.

His eyes sting. They won’t stop stinging. Phantom onions everywhere.

Tuuri’s system can’t handle the sudden onslaught on her lungs. Gripping her stomach, she dashes blindly around the other side of the tank, somehow vaulting over the snowy bundle Sigrun has become, and presently there is the sound of retching in the back. 

Sigrun props herself up on her elbows. A crust of snow hangs like a beard from her jaw. Her eyes burn with anger and red, due to the amount of smoke that has gotten in them. She looks remarkably like Thor, with her fake snow-beard, the burning eyes. And the noise that comes out of her mouth is so deep and rumbling it sounds like divine thunder.  
“Pray tell, Mikkel. Why do we have a smoke bomb? Why is it in the bunk rooms? Trolls aren’t affected by smoke. They’re affected by death from fire and stabby things and getting pushed off tall things, but not by smoke. Not even if a smoke bomb was shoved down is throat. I know. I tried once. So, tell me, why do we have a -”

“Gods damned smoke bomb in the tank?” he guesses.

Her eyes flash.

Peeling the cat carefully from his shoulder, Mikkel strokes her back as soothingly as he can “I’m not sure. It must have fallen out of one of the supply crates.”

She stands and brushes the snow from her knees and shoulders. Not her jaw, though. She doesn’t seem to have noticed the fantastic facial hair she sports there “But how the Hel did it get into a supply crate? What need do we have for it? This is what I’m trying to comprehend, Mikkel, how we got the damned thing in the first place.”

“Well I can’t help you there.” he says honestly.

Finally the sound of puking has stopped. He hears Tuuri take a few deep breaths, then she cries in a ragged voice “I know how it got there! I know!”

 

Sigrun whirls around and stomps to the back of the tank. Mikkel wonders if he should fear for Tuuri’s life- but no. She’s a sweetheart. Manipulative and a little bit under-handed and slightly evil, but still a sweetheart. Sigrun wouldn’t raise a hand against her.

“How?”

“It came with the weapons! Remember when we picked up the rifles and stuff off the loading docks?”

“Of course not! How the Hel can I be expected to remember that? I only remember things essential to keeping us all from dying!”

“That kind of relates, though. Anyway we were picking up the stuff and I was doing an inventory and this weird guy sidled up to me and tried it on, and I was like, get away or I’m going to stab your foot, and he was like, if you change your mind I’m over there and pointed to this big rig and then gave me a smoke bomb, like ‘on the house’.”

“What happened?” Mikkel turns and sees Reynir calling as he crests the slope. Gods only know what Emil and Lalli are doing with him- three different languages between them, and none of them can speak a word of the other’s.

“Where were you?” he demands.

Reynir shrugs “I think Lalli saw a ghost? He ran off into the woods and Emil ran after him and I ran after him and-”

Emil interrupts him “Who set off a smoke bomb in the tank?”

“I didn’t mean to set it off.” says Mikkel firmly, and accidentally in Icelandic, so he just gets a blank stare from Emil.

Meanwhile, Sigrun sounds a little more gentle, around the back of the tank “…next time a jack-ass comes onto you like that and tries to give you a smoke bomb to feel indebted to give him the time of day? You just throw it at his head. Don’t worry about it exploding. I know the military. Any kind of unwanted romantic attention sanctions the use of weapons- just not guns, unless you’re just planning to shoot it over their heads or give them a whack with the butt on the butt. No foot-shots. Learned that the hard way.”

Mikkel has just noticed the cat’s eyes are red and irritated. If there was any way for him to feel guiltier about the way he has just disrupted the day, it is this.   
While he apologises to her in Danish, the noxious effects of the smoke set to work on the boys as they approach cautiously. Lalli has pulled his hood over his eyes, but has to reach up frequently to wipe them, and Reynir is turning green already.

Emil isn’t having as much trouble. He’s a Cleanser, so even the nauseating stuff they put in those smoke bombs don’t bother him all that much.   
He does hang back, however, knowing that too much of the poisonous stuff will make him sick too. 

Well, thinks Mikkel to himself, I’ve done worse, but not much worse than making a kitten cry.

He resolves that he will never again poke strange objects underneath the bunks. Even if they look like bombs. From here on out, he passes on the duty of poking strange objects to whoever wants to claim them first.


	27. 45: Illusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun has been under stress, lately. She decides to cope with this stress by becoming a badger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow this one ran long. Sorry about this, folks, but once I got started on this I couldn't seem to stop. It's almost eight pages. Most of what happens is relevant, I guess.
> 
> Anyway this thing about becoming your luonto/fylgja is just a silly idea I had. I just thought, how funny would it be to see that happen to Reynir and Lalli? And of course this fic works off the presumption that everyone has a spirit, though only mages are able to use theirs. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Of all of the places for Sigrun Eide to have a spectacular meltdown, the Árnasons’ house is a very safe place to do it.

Three years after the first mission, Reynir’s parents have adjusted to the idea of their (twenty-three year old) baby having a career and responsibilities and even colleagues, and have given him their blessing. There have been two missions into the Silent World since the first. The last was particularly trying; this time, they went all the way to Germany. Germany proved a great deal more difficult to navigate and survive than any Scandinavian setting, mostly thanks to the comparatively extreme population density.  
But they all knew their jobs. They all knew each other and got along as perfectly as a group of radically different friends can be expected to get along.

They had a common language this time- Icelandic- which was a huge plus, because now everyone could follow Sigrun’s anecdotes and Mikkel’s soft-spoken sasses and the strange observations Lalli made when in conversation.

Still, it was a trying time. None of them could dash away back to their other jobs after so long a winter, so Reynir, being the sweetheart he is, proposed a solution. His parents were going on the first vacation they had taken since he was born and his house would be empty.  
So they could take a few weeks off in the peace and serenity in the sheep-strewn hills of the Árnason property. Onni could come too, if he wanted. Onni didn’t want to. Later, Tuuri told Reynir privately that Onni had once had a very traumatising experience with a rabid sheep and probably just didn’t want to confront his phobia.

So, in the third day of what proved so far to be a very, very relaxing holiday from horror, Sigrun Eide wakes up thinking she is a badger.  
Not thinking. Knowing. Deep, deep down, some ancient and primal part of her makes itself known as her eyes drift open. This primal part does not want to be inside a house of wood and stone. It wants to dig a hole with only her hands and go be in that hole and love that hole, because it belongs in the earth and the earth wants it back, and it doesn’t like the bright noises and loud lights.

Sigrun stands. The enormity of her discovery almost pushes her back into the mattress.

How could she have been blind for so many years? Of course she is a badger! She’s fierce! She’s vicious! She digs holes and sleeps in them!

Sigrun opens the door, cautious in case her claws comes out- she does not want to spear the doorknob on one of them. She pads out of the borrowed room and encounters Emil in the hallway, freshly brushed and dressed and looking well-rested.

He says: “Good morning.”

She says: “I’m a gods-damned badger.” 

Then she dashes past him and leaps out of the second-story window, landing lightly in the snow, and sets off into the Icelandic spring to find herself a nice place to dig her hole.

 

Naturally, Emil has a hard time explaining this to the others. 

Of course he had to be the only one to see their captain dive out of the window and zoom off into the green hills. He is always the only one to see weird things like that. Reynir and Lalli get to see ghosts and creatures of eldritch horror. Him? He gets to see his friends having psychotic breaks.

Emil comes into the dining room (what Reynir’s parents call the room with the big table that’s attached to the kitchen) and finds the others are already gathered around the table. Mikkel has made breakfast. He’s proved a good cook when he has actual, genuine food ingredients with which to cook, rather than the sawdust gruel they have to eat on every mission.  
Even as the missions’ funding increases, the Västerströms refuse to put anything new on the menu. They want to save their money for bigger weapons. They were also going to pack the team into a bigger tank but it was decided that the ‘Cat Tank’ was just as much a member of the team as the scout, the driver and the unexpected bonus that came with the tuna, so they’ve been forced to use part of the surplus to just buy the tank for good.

It’s living in a garage in Mora, right now, and Emil uses it as a reading space when he visits his family and can find no peace from his cousins in the house.

If they had the tank with them, they might be able to catch up to Sigrun in a few minutes, bundle her away to safety and administer whatever sedatives are necessary to snap her out of her illusions of being a badger.

Lalli looks up at him. He immediately notices the shell-shocked expression on Emil’s face and pulls out the chair beside him, beckoning.

“What’s wrong?” he asks discreetly when Emil has sat down.

“Sigrun just jumped out the window.” he replies, just as discreetly.

Lalli blinks “What’s wrong with that? She does it all the time.”

“Morning Emil,” says Reynir “Did you have a bad dream or something?”

“Sigrun told me she was a badger and jumped out a window. To find a place to dig herself a set, I think.”

 

It’s called ‘going feral’, explains Reynir.

When someone enters an extreme amount of stress, emotional or mental, their fylgja or luonto does exactly the opposite of what it usually does in response to stress. Instead of running away, the spirit attempts to completely bond with the person projecting it.

“Wait, everyone has a fyl- flarghle-shnargle?” asks Tuuri. Her Icelandic is excellent, normally, but for some reason this word has her tongue tripping all over itself. 

“Yes. Everyone.”

She shoots her cousin an accusing stare “You didn’t tell me that!”

“You didn’t ask.”

“What does mine look like?”

“Dunno. Never seen it. It’s probably a seal.” 

“Why do you think so?”

“Well that’d be like you. Fat and cheerful.”

The conversation stalls for a few moments as Tuuri chases Lalli under the table and through several rooms and outside and finally, into the barn, where they resume the conversation, with Lalli in the hayloft and Tuuri gasping breath into her scorched lungs at the bottom of the ladder. The others drop into the dry hay. 

“So what happens if the luonto succeeds? I mean, in acclimating the whole…the whole projecting body? What happens then?”

Lalli peers at his gasping cousin from his vantage point “You don’t remember? It happened to Onni.”

She furrows her brow “When did it happen to Onni?”

“What do you mean when did it happen? When he started sitting in trees and turning his head all the way around.”

“Shouldn’t that be medically impossible?” asks Mikkel, who looks something like an old-world sultan on a throne of gold, as he sinks deeper and deeper into the hay.

Reynir jumps in “Nah! Once that happens, you start taking on the physical characteristics of your fylgja. Like, you know how losing it makes you physically sick? Well getting it kinda bound to you makes you do the opposite. You start turning into the animal. Tuuri, you really don’t remember that happening to your brother? Lalli told me about it.”

Tuuri shoots Lalli a glare that is somewhere between filthy and fond “Hmph. I guess I remember. That was when-”

“You were seeing that guy. Hannu. You didn’t notice anything that was going on at home.”

The look turns a hundred percent filthy “I am allowed to have a life outside the family, you know.”

“Not when Onni’s sitting in trees and barfing pellets, you’re not.”

Mikkel interrupts before they can get started again “What do we do to reverse this process? Can it be stopped?”

“Oh, sure! We just need to figure out what’s bothering Sigrun and help her out with that,” Reynir’s face falls “Only…Lalli and I can’t go.”

“Why not?” asks Emil.

Reynir wrings the end of his braid anxiously “It’s contagious. If me and Lalli go, our fylgja will see what’s going on and try it for themselves.”

“Already happened to me once.” says Lalli “Grew a tail, when Onni thought he was an owl. ‘Course Tuuri can’t confirm that, can she?”

“Alright, alright, I admit it. I was a bad sister slash cousin. I’m sorry I didn’t help you fix Onni. How…how did you fix him, by the way?”

Lalli shrugs “Just sat with him. Took him to a quiet place and sat with him. Talked to him a little bit. Just reminded him he was a human and he could be safe in the human world.”

With an effort, Mikkel rises from the hay and brushes what clings to him from his trousers “Let’s go, then. The day is young, but who knows how far into…into her badgerification Sigrun might be by now. Boys, you stay here. Emil, guard them.”

“What? Why?”

“I’d rather talk to Sigrun without you. If she sees you, she’s going to remember that she likes to attack you.”

“For training!” he protests.

Mikkel cocks an eyebrow “How would you like to spar with a half-badger madwoman?”

Emil sits back down without further complaint.

 

Mikkel and Tuuri are gone ten minutes later. On foot, and towing Reynir. He convinced them to let him go because he was the best in the area at finding lost sheep. If he could find a sheep, then how hard would it be to find a woman over six feet tall with flame red hair, trying to make herself a badger’s set?  
It was a fair point that no one could think how to dismiss. Reynir promised he wouldn’t turn into a sheepdog, Mikkel said he would hold him to that, and off they went.

From the front step of the Árnason house, Lalli and Emil watch them go.

Emil yawns and passes an arm around Lalli’s shoulders “That was a weird morning.”

“I bet.”

“She…she kind of did look like a badger. Just the teeth, but kind of.”

“She’ll be fine. Mikkel will talk her around.”

“Hope so. Hey, have you ever seen my luonto?”

The ghost of a smile touches the corner of Lalli’s mouth “Yes. You’re a stag.”

“Aw. Thanks.”

“No, literally. A big blond stag. Silver horns and a tail and all.”

Emil grins impishly “Am I pretty?”

“What do you think?”

“I’d still love you, by the way. If you turned into a lynx.”

“I might actually prefer you as a stag. I’d never have to walk anywhere again.”

“What, you think I’d ferry you all over the place?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

A child is passing on the other side of the road, leaving her house for a day of hard play. She looks across the road and sees a pair of young men, obviously completely, sickeningly in love, and does what comes natural to children when they see these things.

She cups her hands to her mouth and screeches “EEEEEWWWWW!”

 

Because she is over six feet tall and flame-headed, Sigrun is not difficult to find. What is remarkable is that in the short time it has taken for her run from Emil and a search party to be organised, to the time it takes Reynir to distinguish the trail of a half-mad berserker from that of his own flock of sheep, Sigrun has clawed herself out a complete and cosy set. 

A person-sized set, so it bears more than a passing resemblance to some grave that has been freshly emptied (by the efforts of the body inside) or a portal to Hel’s land. 

“You two hang back,” suggests Mikkel “I’ll see what I can do. If she goes crazy and attacks, I’d rather that only one of us gets their nose scratched off.”

Reynir wants to protest, but Tuuri hooks her fingers in his collars and tugs him back to the top of the slope. Sigrun’s set is at the bottom. 

He approaches cautiously. Though he is not really afraid she will attack him. In spite of what he told the other two (mainly because he doesn’t want Reynir turning into a sheepdog), Mikkel is not afraid Sigrun will attack him, even if slowly changing into a badger may have caused certain paranoias she used to hold about him to resurface.  
If he is wrong and she does launch herself at him screaming ‘mutineer’, at least he’ll know not to trust her sanity so much the next time around.

Mikkel stops at the mouth of the set and crouches. Two pinpricks of light peer out at him- eyes, glowing in the dark. No longer their usual violet. They’re kind of yellow and black and very, very suspicious.

“Sigrun?” he tries.

“What?” comes the throaty response.

“Wow.”

“What?” she repeats, with the edge of a snarl.

“You sound…you sound hoarse. Are you alright in there?” 

“Never better.” she snarls “I’m a badger.”

“You’re a badger.” he repeats uncertainly “Yes, alright, you’re a badger. But only spiritually. You’re actually a human woman in reality. Do you remember being a human woman?”

“Of course. It happened, like, yesterday. But that doesn’t matter anymore. I’m a badger now. I’m where I belong.”

Mikkel is not sure whether he should be glad or unnerved that he cannot see any more of his friend than her burning eyes, disembodied in the dark “In a set? A hand-dug set? I have to admit this is an impressive job for the short time you had. But, Sigrun, you have a life.”

“A lie!” she hisses.

The hiss is so feral and violent, Mikkel cannot help but reel back in anticipation of claws flying for him. When this does not happen, and his heart has stopped hammering, he sits down directly in front of the set. It might calm her down a little quicker to see that he is calm.  
Pretending to be, at least.

“Why was your life a lie?”

“Because I was living it as a human woman, gods-dammit! But I’m really a badger! Someone should have told me.” she sounds sullen.

“You know, something like this happened with a brother of mine. He was a sister, to begin with, and that made him so unhappy you wouldn’t believe it. All the way through our childhoods the rest of us suspected he was born into the wrong body. We didn’t broach the topic with him until most of us were into our teen years, and our brother was on the verge of puberty. And when we finally told him what we thought he started to cry and demanded to know why none of us had told him we knew he was in the wrong body sooner. Then, at least, he wouldn’t have thought his condition was a delusion.”

Sigrun grunts “I know about him. I’ve met him.”

“You met him as he should be. But you never met him when he was a girl. My brother looks alright now, doesn’t he?”

She grunts again.

Mikkel takes this as a sign of agreement “When he was stuck in that girl’s body he was the unhappiest person you’d ever meet. What I’m trying to say is…I know what it looks like when someone is in the body they don’t belong in. I grew up with a person like that. Sigrun, I don’t think you’ve ever been anything but comfortable with the idea of being a human woman. Triumphant, in fact. You know you brag about how much better than me you are because you’re a strong, as competent and intelligent and on top of that you can bear children too?”

A beat of silence. When she speaks next, her voice is less animal, and more the smug Sigrun tones he has come to expect and appreciate “Men would be an expendable gender if women could reproduce on our own.”

“There’s my sexist captain.”

“I’m not sexist, I’m a realist.”

“There’s my sexist captain, parading under the banner of realism.”

“Shush, you.”

“How is it in the set, by the way?”

“It’s full of dirt. Kinda comfortable, kind of not.”

“Anything like a hobbit hole?”

The eyes have lost their sheen. They seem to have disappeared almost entirely, in fact, and the putrescent yellow colouring fades even as he watches “Of course not. This is a badger’s set.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“G’head.”

“Do you think you might be stressed because of the approaching parenthood?”

“Well duh! No woman starts growing another damned person in her stomach without some hormonal ramifications!”

“Then perhaps this sudden…violent urge to claim badger-hood is a response to that? The idea of becoming a mom, soon?”

She grunts, but it is not an animal’s grunt. It’s the noise she makes when she doesn’t want to get out of bed or her chair “Guess so. I mean, I guess I haven’t really…come to terms with it. I’m basically already a mom. How weird is that? One minute I’m just Sigrun and the next I’m somebody’s mom. I guess that’s why I haven’t told anyone but you. I’m not even sure if it’s true, yet, you know? If I can be a mom.”

“Well you raised Emil fairly well.”

She scoffs “Emil was nineteen when I met him. I just pushed him in the right direction.”

“Knocked him down and rolled him, more like.”

She chuckles “You can shut up. Ugh, gods. Give me your hand. I need help out of here.”

A hand extends from the set. Dirt-streaked, but not clawed, as Mikkel is relieved to note. He grips it and pulls her out, cautious of the stomach she’s sliding out on. His godchild is forming in there.

Sigrun emerges, half-covered in dirt. She looks exactly like herself. No badger-ish additions or feral glint in her eye. Well, no more of a feral glint than was already there.

At the top of the hill, the kids are delighted to see her. Reynir waves and calls out something indistinct. Tuuri claps her hands and grins widely, glad that her captain has not emerged as a fully-sized badger.

Mikkel wraps an arm around Sigrun’s shoulder “Are you ready to go back?”

She puts a hand to her stomach thoughtfully, and sighs through her nose “Sure, I guess.”


	28. 25: Trouble lurking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Norwegians have a strange initiation rite for their new recruits. Emil is pretty sure they're going to die.

Night is Dalsnes is unlike anything Emil has ever experienced before. He has seen some dark nights before with the Cleansers, but not as truly dark as these Dalsnes nights get. There was always a campfire burning on embers from late night to the early morning with the Cleansers. In Mora, the electricity ran smoothly, efficiently and did not switch off with the sun. People had things to do in the middle of the night other than sleeping, as the lights that made squares of gold out of at least one window in every house were apt to show.

Even in the Tank, in the wilds of the sickest, most insidious parts of Emil’s world, the inside kind of glowed. It was the mages’ fault. It’s a little known fact that mages actually glow when they get close to each other, as a kind of biological indication of when they are close to another of their own magical kind. No one knows for sure why it happens. Reynir thinks it is a physical manifestation of the mages’ luontos interacting. Lalli seems to be embarrassed every time it happens and prefers not to talk about it.   
As Reynir got in touch with his spiritual side, he also started to sweat light and made Lalli do the same. It got to the point that it was possible to see where he was going in the tank at night, save the stuff coming off the two mages.

Tonight, he wishes more than anything that they had the pair of mages with them. They’d light the way for at least a quarter mile in every direction. And summon all the trolls from at least double that in every direction, but Emil would prefer fighting trolls he can see emerging from an eerie, mage-generated glow than waiting in total darkness for a troll he cannot. 

Or, as Sigrun puts it “It’s as dark as Loki’s soul out here. Wish that cloud would get its stuff together and move off the moon already.”

Emil has a tight grip on the back of her coat. Sigrun is hard to hang onto when it’s light and he can see where his feet are going, so he’s not about to risk losing her in such a darkness.  
“Can we really not bring a lantern with us?”

“Nope. Tradition.”

“But-”

“Tradition.”

“So was sacking and pillaging England and Ireland, but we stopped that because it was stupid and got people killed! Like this is stupid and will get us killed.”

“Yeah, only ‘cos they’re out of reach.”

“Sigrun that is the most insensitive-”

“What Celt is lurking out here in the dark for me to offend with my bad jokes? Calm down, Em. Take some deep breaths. There’s no angry Celts out here. I promise.”

He hears the smile in her voice and wants to smack it off her face. What right does she have to smile? This is the most terrifying moment of Emil’s life so far. And that whole winter in the tank was literally just horrifying moment after horrifying moment.  
This is even scarier than the first time he kissed Lalli, when he was petrified that, instead of kissing him like a normal person, he’d freak out and mess it up and end up biting Lalli’s lower jaw clean off.

He didn’t. Lalli’s lower jaw is still firmly attached to that grimly set mouth.   
But this? This could really get him killed.

Here they are. Headed for the woods just outside Dalsnes, which are still freezing on a summer’s night, and standing stock-still just in front of the tree-line where anything can see them. Sigrun won’t let him move without the light of the moon to guide them.  
She says she’s seen a few initiations where that rule was broken and the whole thing had to be stalled for long minutes, to extract someone’s foot from a fox-hole or a crevice between rocks. Once, she says, someone stepped right on a troll’s face. She asked Emil if he wanted to fight to the death in total darkness. Emil was glad for the total darkness at that point, because she could not see the way his face crumpled miserably as he said that he didn’t.

Finally, the clouds slide off the moon. It hangs overhead, full and yellow as a gold coin, but also looking a bit sickly. More like the eye of a person with a serious case of jaundice than a gold coin.  
Only when the moon has completely inched out from under the clouds will Sigrun let him move again.

She sets off a at brisk pace, which forces him to take two steps for every one of hers “When I was your age I had already been initiated for, let me think…well I got in when I was fourteen and I was officially initiated when I was fifteen, so there you go. Four years.”

“Five years.” he corrects.

“You’ve only been twenty for three months, Emil. Slow down there.”

She ruffles his hair affectionately. Used to be she only did that to Tuuri because of Tuuri’s head’s convenient location, at about chest-height, or chin-height if Sigrun wanted something to lean on. Emil suspects she has only adopted the habit of mussing his hair because she discovered how much she enjoys the texture.

“So what happened at your initiation?” he asks as they pass through the tree-line.

Cold shadows seem to fall over him from every direction. He does not yet feel the black terror he so often felt seeping into him last winter, when he was sure he was headed for an early grave, but there is certainly a prickle of unease. 

Sigrun shrugs. It is hard to see her expression, with what little light filters through the canopy. He imagines she is either grimacing or grinning at her memories “I went with Trond. Trond was still a fine warrior back then. He still is now, of course, but you know. A fine warrior that could fight without a cane. He took me out here under the full moon, the same way we’re doing, and he told me his war stories. I mean, I’d heard them a million times already. They were just a lot scarier when I was hearing them out in the dark. And I went in winter, so it was freezing as well and every time snow fell off a branch somewhere, I thought we were going to be attacked.”

“Were you?”

“What, attacked? Of course! Everyone gets attacked on their initiation night!”

Emil swallows with difficulty “It would have been nice to know that before you convinced me to do this.”

She snorts “Nah! That woulda just scared you worse. I’m not soulless, you know.”

“I know. But you are a little bit evil.”

“Just a little bit,” she agrees “Alright, here’s the fork. Which way do you want to go?”

This, she did warn him of; once the initiate has arrived in the woods, they will be taken to a certain game-trail which forks off. The right will lead them into the heart of the forest. Here, they will find trolls, among other, stranger and older things. The left will lead them along the edge of the forest. Here, they will end up walking the rim of a small valley and see many trolls, most of which will try their hand at climbing the slope to take a chunk out of the initiate and their supervising warrior.

It’s a toss-up between a night full of fighting and a night spent bumping into things so insidiously old, the gods have probably forgotten their true names. 

Emil considers it for a moment. The left trail is grassy and fringed with thick, over-hanging trees. Not that inviting.   
The right trail is thickly flowered, in spite of the season being only the earliest hours of spring, and even more heavily shadowed by the over-hanging trees. Even less inviting.

“Which trail did you pick?” he asks Sigrun.

Sigrun crosses her arms in front of her chest “The right.”

“You saw some weird things?”

She nods.

“I’m not allowed to ask what weird things those were, am I?”

She shakes her head.

So it’s the devil he knows or the devil he doesn’t.  
Well, he has had his fill of devils he knows. The winter ensured that. Emil’s troll-kill-count is somewhere up in the high dozens now- one of the reasons Sigrun’s colleagues accepted him so enthusiastically when Sigrun brought him to Dalsnes.

Now he has the choice of elevating that kill-count even further? No thanks. He’d rather destroy the last scraps of his atheism by stumbling over a Vanir family reunion than have to kill one more troll. For tonight, anyway.

“The right.” he says. His voice does not waver.

In the pallid light of the yellow moon, Sigrun smiles “Right it is.”

They turn right and head into the thick gloom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My shipping urges are getting much stronger as time goes on. Ageing like a fine wine or a remarkably pungent cheese. 
> 
> And what happened to Emil and Sigrun? Well let's suppose they stumbled across a drunken Asgardian rave and hob-knobbed a little bit with the gods, had some mead and Sigrun danced with Tyr and then Tyr fell head over heels for her and lightly stalked her for five months afterwards, until she summoned up the necessary will to blaspheme against her gods and just gave him a good squirt of mace.   
> Yeah, that sounds about right.


	29. 41: Teamwork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli's luonto is lost and on the verge of death, but he can make it back. With a little bit of help and teamwork from Emil's luonto, that is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes. Yes, luontos are talking. Like the spirits did in aRTD's. The place the luontos refer to as 'the Spirits' is their word for the magescape our magical boys traipse all over. They probably just see the other things like them.  
> And 'awkward' is in this case a term for humans. I suspect the luontos and fylgja would think us extremely clumsy, for being locked in our flesh vaults and tripping over things and breaking our fragile calcium sticks.  
> That's it, I guess? Just an idea from page 511 (isn't it just the prettiest thing? What a brilliant way to end a chapter break) as to how Lalli's luonto got back to him.

I am lost.

Lost in two ways. Lost so that I know not where I am. Lost so that I have lost the other part of myself. It has happened once before, when he over-exerted himself in our first battle with a Sick. He called me forth and I fought well. Hard and well, but we were not prepared, and so I lost him for just a few days. He did not sleep during that time.  
He was too young to be weakened by losing me- our bond was too young. I came back two days later, scared and a little hurt from being gone, and he did not know that he had lost me until I returned to him.

We were so young.

We are older now. I am always days older than him because I came into the world two days before he was born. I could not follow him inside, so was bound to drift listlessly after the mage-mother that was so over-joyed to see me appear. And when he was born I resolved we should never be separated.

I cannot explain it to those who are not luonto or fylgja. I can scarcely explain it to myself. 

Now, though, I feel closer to the truth of it. Of what it means to coexist with one of the awkward creatures the gods have strewn across the earth, to know that you are bound to live or die with them, because one cannot subsist after the other has gone.  
I will tell you now if you can follow it.

It means that you are loved, immediately and unconditionally, and have the chance to give the same back without the fear of having it torn up and tossed back or used against you.  
To be a luonto, or a fylgja, is to be love and to love and to do everything in your power to ensure you are allowed to exist like that, with your awkward other half, until Tuonela calls. Or Valhalla. Even that den of heathens and drunks is populated by good fylgja who have protected their awkwards loyally and well. 

I do not number among them any longer. I have failed. We- we have failed. He, for not understanding our limits. I, for not making him understand. Next time I see that boy (there will be a next time, I know it), the first thing I’ll do is swat him upside the head for nearly killing us.  
The silly thing. But it is good to make mistakes. The Owl told me this. My awkward’s guardian’s luonto is a wise and powerful beast, if not a terrible coward whenever he can afford to be. They are a jumpy pair, I suppose, but I sense they have drawn closer to us since last we spoke.

Where am I, while my awkward lies prostrated by our weakness?

I do not know. I have never been this far into the Spirits without the guidance of my awkward. A clear goal in my mind. If you enter the Spirits without design, you are doomed to roam. My design is to find my awkward, of course, but there is no way of knowing which way to go.  
The spirits in the Spirits confound me. I have lost my consciousness. Not quite my identity. That will come later, when I have already lost hope and the motivation to keep going for a minute more, and then I will die and kill him hours later.

It will be cruel. It will be painful and unforgiving. In his last hours, he will awake to scream and rave and scream his agony, to cry for the family we have lost and the family that is now so far away, and our cousin will clutch us close to try to soothe us. She has seen this before. She knows it is no way for a mage to die.  
If she is merciful, she will end it quickly for what remains of us.

But she will not be. She will hold out against hope that I will come back from this place to save him- this place that I cannot even see any longer. All I know are swirling lights and the chattering voices of the dead trapped among the Spirits and that my paws will never touch solid ground again, and that I will never see my stupid, silly awkward again.

“Lynx?”

And now they know my name. The spirits of the Spirits know my name. This is wonderful; they intend to mock me before I fade.

“Lynx.” repeats the same, single voice, insistent and afraid.

And that is not right. The spirits of the Spirits always speak in unison because they know it is unnerving and enjoy the effect. Yet, I hear only one voice calling to me, and it is afraid.

It must be a new trick.

I summon my voice with some considerable effort “Begone, imp. I have no patience for your trade today. I am to die soon and I would prefer to quit the world in peace.”

“I’m no imp!” says the same voice impatiently “I’m a friend. Now look down at me, will you?”

I cannot resist the compulsion, and twist my neck. With this lone movement, the physical dimension reasserts itself and at once I become aware of standing on the underside of a low-hanging cloud.  
Beneath me, I see him. A large, proud animal with branching silver antlers, as large as me on each side, and gold fur that catches the light of the Spirits beautifully. He stands on a solid, grassy island, surrounded by water.  
A small chain of islands winds out as far as the horizon in either direction. I am back in the mages’ level of the Spirits. The realm of the dead’s is behind me. 

I want to cry with relief.

“Stag?” I venture “Is that you?”

“Yes! Can you get down?”

My grip on the cloud’s underbelly seems at once precarious. How did I get up here? How am I going to get down, more importantly, without losing my grip and tumbling into the sky? I have seen it happen before.  
My awkward’s grandmother- our grandmother- her luonto fell into the sky to be consumed by the spirits of the Spirits when she expired.

The Owl and I watched her be eaten. It was impossible not to.

I do not wish to die like that. I wish to accompany my awkward to Tuonela, whatever that takes.

“No,” I answer steadily “Have you any suggestions?”

“Well I suppose you could just jump for me.”

“Jump for you?”

“You can jump far, can’t you? Just aim for my back. I’m quite tall you know. My back is at least two metres off the ground.”

I consider this. I cannot forget there is an awkward attached to the Stag. One I am very, very fond of in spite of my best efforts not to be- he is the epitome of all things bad about awkwards. His clumsiness and heavy-handed way of dealing with his peers, his lack of sensitivity and his stupid, perfect hair. And he is also everything good about awkwards. Stubbornly kind, sweet-tempered (to the point that I am inclined to believe he never grows angry) and efficient, when he gets something flaming in his hands and is told exactly what to shoot.

And he has wonderful hair.

I cannot bring myself to leap at the Stag and score his flanks, to injure the sweet boy attached to him, can I?

But neither can I bring myself to allow my own boy to die. We are still so young. We still have so much to do.

Emil can recover. I will heal him myself, if necessary. We do not know how to heal yet, but I will seek out a spirit, and I will learn from them, or bring them to Emil’s side. If necessary.

“Alright. I’ll try.”

“Worst to worst I can just catch you with my horns.” assures the Stag. 

“You’ll gore me to death you fool.”

“Oh, you’ll be fine! Come on then!”

Like his awkward, the Stag is mostly a kind entity, if he is occasionally distracted by his own prowess and attractiveness. I enjoy his company, too, a little more than I am willing to admit.

“Brace yourself.”

To force myself to jump, I think of my awkward. I think of how young we are and how much time we still have.

And I jump.

The Spirits tumble around me. I feel the pull of the sky trying to bring me back to it. If I am pulled back, I will smash through the cloud-cover and tumble straight on through into the sky. The Stag will have to watch me devoured.

With this thought spurring me on, I stretch my front-legs forward and extend my claws as far as I can. It may be the most terrible thing I have done, to watch myself tumbling upside-down, for the Stag, my claws bared and my teeth as well, though it is in a grimace.  
I never want to do this again. I feel my claws sink into his flanks and hear the slight, muffled low of pain he gives, and I resolve that I will never be lost from my awkward again.

Thankfully, the moment I touch him I cease to feel the tug of the sky on me. My own weight presses back down on me. I am solid and certain once more.

Blood flows hotly underneath my claws. 

“Ouch,” says the Stag lightly “Are you with us again?”

“I’m fine. I can…I can no longer feel the spirits of the Spirits summoning me.”

The Stag tosses his magnificent head with satisfaction “Excellent! Now let’s restore you to that awkward of yours before he leaves us completely. He’s been quite ill, you know.”

It pains me to hear this, but I do not tell the Stag so. He clearly intends to carry me the rest of the way back to my awkward. And after I injured him so I can hardly begrudge him for anything he wishes to do to me.  
Nor can I move of my own accord. I am stuck, slumped across the Stag’s back and in his weeping wounds. I can only imagine what his awkward might look like at the moment.

The Stag leaps smoothly and easily from island to island. If he notices he turns the water red in our wake and the grass, glistening, he does not let me know “Of course we knew the two of you had made a mistake. The mistake, I suppose, would be your awkward. Poor silly thing over-exerted himself, didn’t he? I suppose you’ll be giving him a smart slap the moment you see him.”

“You can only imagine.” I concede.

I am growing stronger. Every step the Stag takes brings me closer to the rest of myself.

“He’s been asleep for some time now. I can’t measure days very well, you know, those sun-moon cycles have never made much sense to me. At any rate, it has been no short time. You two really should be back together by now. Do you mind if I run?”

Oh, gods. This is going to hurt.  
“No. Please do.”

The Stag is exceedingly fast for a luonto that does not belong to a mage. I am not sure what his incredible speed indicates about the awkward he belongs to, but whatever it is, I expect it will serve Emil well in the future. If he ever finds out there is something quite remarkable about him.

At the speeds the Stag can reach, the two of us need only run for a few minutes. As I hang onto his back as best I can without puncturing his flanks again, watching ribbons of blood spiral off and behind us, the Stag tells me what has happened since I was lost.

They have all been looking for me. Were it not a matter of such intense urgency that I am restored to my awkward, the Stag would take a detour to find the others, to assure them I am not dead or lost to them.  
The Sable, the Bear, the Seal and even the Dog, who has just been realised as a source of magical power and is therefore so energetic and jumpy at the moment, he is essentially useless. He is probably chasing the spirits of sheep over rolling hills right now. Either that, or searching for me, the elusive Lynx, down rabbit holes and inside the caves of bats. 

Out of all of my seekers, it does not surprise me that the Stag was the one to find me. Had our situations been reversed I am sure I would have made it my business to find him first. 

The two of us arrive at the edge of my awkward’s haven. Immediately, I smell the Sick on it.

“Gods!” I exclaim, leaping from the Stag’s back “You didn’t tell me he’d been attacked!”

“Has he? I was not aware. We all set out looking for you the moment we noticed you were gone. In that case, will you allow me to escort you inside?”

“Yes. He’s likely to be too weak to keep you out at any rate. We must hurry.”

As I suspected, the shield that is supposed to defend my awkward against all attacks barely protests when the Stag passes. At first it glows, meaning to repel him. But he has only to dip his head and push through antler-first and the shield sputters and sags out of his way.

My awkward is not dead. He is not very alive either, when I find him.

He sits on the banks of the pond where he sleeps while he is awake. Too weak to stay afloat in the centre. Gods. How could I allow us to do this to ourselves?

Hearing my approach, he manages to look up. The expression on his greyed face is indescribable. I want to run to him, but I can still only stagger. I pad into his arms. We melt together.

And this sensation?

Well, I cannot describe it to those who are not luonto or fylgja. Not in a way that will do the sensation justice. Just know that I feel it in every cell. I breathe it. I see it. I smell it. It fills my veins and gives me back my life.

We stand. We look to the Stag.

I say “Thank you.”

The Stag nods to me; too shy to speak in front of my awkward.

Lalli contemplates the Stag’s presence in his haven. He wants to know why the Stag is bloody. Why he is here at all.  
What did I do to him?

“We should look for ourselves.” I tell him “I fear…I fear I may have injured Emil at our expense.”

He is not angry with me. Later, when the transcendent relief of our reunion has worn off, and he has had the time to take in what I have done to our friend, he will be angry.

But for now all he can do is bow his head to the Stag and thank him. The Stag is gone when he has straightened.

 

The first thing Lalli hears are his own bones. They are stiff. Clicking in their joints, berating him for refusing to move for so long. He’s going to need a serious stretch. But that can wait.

Outside, he hears someone shouting. Not in pain, which brings him a small measure of relief, as he struggles to right himself. It sounds as if they are all outside the tank.

Lalli makes it to the front of the tank by hanging on to all available surfaces. He has to slump against the doorframe to stay on his feet. From there, he has an excellent vantage point to the scene.

Emil is on his knees, his back turned to Lalli. Mikkel swabs at the long cuts which mar his back, three on either side, and so deep Lalli fancies he can see bone. No. Just a trick of the light. As far as he can tell, Emil is not making a sound.  
Sigrun sits in front of him, holds his hand in both of hers, saying things to him in their weird shared language. Her face is serious. Her smile is genuine. Reynir is nearby with a stick in his hand and a look of determination on his face- he seems to be confronting his paralysing fear of trolls by poking the corpse of the one that Emil apparently felled. 

Lalli is just wondering where his cousin has got to when a pair of thick, soft arms encircle his waist (thinner than the arms at their thickest point) and a heavy head slams between his shoulder blades.

“Thank the merciful gods,” whispers Tuuri in their language “You came back. I thought you were dead.”

Lalli pats her arms “I’m alright. Emil?”

“It came out of nowhere. It almost bit Reynir’s head clean off, but Emil got it. It…it got him pretty good too.”

“Go help them.”

“But what about you-”

“I’m going. I have to find something. Don’t tell anyone I’ve gone until I come back.”

Freeing himself from her grip, Lalli creeps silently down the steps. No one notices him: there are more pressing issues to worry about. Tuuri follows him around the back of the tank. When she sees he is not even putting on shoes, she makes him pause to put on hers, and wrap himself in her coat as well.

“What are you doing?”

He shrugs in his over-sized coat “There has to be a näkki out here that doesn’t mind helping a human.”

“You think so? But I thought there were only ghosts out here.”

“There are. The healthy things are hiding.”

She frowns “You really think something will help Emil?”

“I’ll ask nicely.”

Lalli turns and lopes off into the snow. Every step returns some strength to his limbs. He feels his luonto’s breath on the back of his neck, whispering apologies in the musical language of the spirits. Lalli does not listen.

Behind him, he hears Emil cry out for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Bear = Mikkel's  
> The Seal =Tuuri's  
> The Sable =Sigrun's (a small member of the marten family. Read: semi-psychotic cold-weather mustelid)  
> The Dog= Reynir's


	30. 33: Expectations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri's new apartment has another tenant. A dead one, at that, but Tuuri is used to dealing with dead things. Sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little idea: what if Reynir was haunting someone's apartment? It doesn't really come across in this prompt (short space to work with and all that) but I think Reynir would be the most thoughtful ghost ever. He'd find your car keys for you and fold your laundry and fish out all that elusive change that falls between the couch cushions.

When Tuuri is told her new apartment is haunted, she expects to be able to figure out pretty quickly whether or not this is true. Her family has a long history of seeing the strange, the unusual, and the things which do not wish to be seen and often do not react well to being seen. Her cousin and old brother, Lalli and Onni, have the worst of it this time around. There’s always one or two members of each new generation of Hotakainens which attracts the most trouble.  
These two are those two.

Tuuri, on the other hand, is a relatively mild presence to spirits. The way they are just kind of shadows drifting in the corner of her vision- it’s the same vice versa. They ignore her. She ignores them for the most part.

So, when her landlord tells her the new apartment is as haunted as a graveyard, Tuuri barely bats an eyelid.

The guy’s name is Mikkel. He’s a doctor, in addition to being her landlord, and seems pretty nonplussed about having a haunted unit. Well, not actually her landlord. Her landlady’s twin brother. But he keeps an eye on the tenants for her whenever she has to go abroad. Tuuri likes him. 

“When you say haunted, what do you mean?” she asks on the day she moves in.

Because he is a startlingly nice person (in spite of an appearance that suggests he was raised by bears and has not strayed far from his roots), he helps her move her stuff in. Lalli and Onni both have other engagements, and Emil (the newest Hotakainen, by way of marrying her cousin) is in the hospital recovering from an organ donation to one of his own little cousins.

“I mean haunted.” he says simply. That is Mikkel’s way; stoic and simple “I mean things will move from the surface on which you last saw them. Doors will open and close of their own accord. You will hear a disembodied voice- you don’t speak Icelandic, do you?”

Tuuri is surprised by the question “I do, actually. I’m fluent. I took some courses and studied abroad in Iceland for a year.”

“Ah, at your age? That’s impressive. And also a terrible shame. You’re going to be able to understand what he says.”

“He?” 

“Every previous tenant was convinced the ghost is of the male persuasion. None of them have seen him before and none of them were ever proficient enough in Icelandic to know what the heck the disembodied whispers were- mind the silverware box, it’s about to fall.”

Tuuri catches the sagging corner and shoves it back onto the counter-top before it can finish its swan-dive “I might be able to see him.”

Mikkel cocks a thick eyebrow “Oh yes?”

Tuuri cannot help but flash him a smug smile. She is used to dealing with scepticism any time her family’s unusual affliction- blessing, perhaps- arises in conversation “Yep. Runs in the family. My cousin- he dropped me off the first time we met.”

“The thin fellow with the haunted look in his eyes?”

“That’s him. My cousin can see ghosts as well as you and I can see each other. I know it sounds hard to believe, but he’s really like that. One foot in the spiritual world and one foot in ours. It drives his husband crazy, because sometimes he’ll start accidentally channelling the spirits of dead people and talk to him in dead languages, or ask Emil – that’s his husband – if he knows where he left the rest of his body.”

Mikkel’s other eyebrow goes up. This time, it is not a sceptical gesture “You don’t mean Emil Västerström, do you?”

“It’s Emil Hotakainen now. You know him?”

“My best friend baby sat him from when he was two until thirteen.”

The topic of the ghost is quickly forgotten as Mikkel and Tuuri figure out they have been living parallel lives and have many of the same friends.

Tuuri is so pleased to have had a nice, constructive conversation with a mature adult (a doctor? This guy obviously knows what he’s doing) and made what she hopes is going to be a good friend in the future that she completely forgets about the ghost until he takes it upon himself to introduce himself.

She is just coming out of the bathroom in her pyjamas, dabbing at a lingering froth of toothpaste on her lower lip, when she is reminded of the ghost’s presence.  
Her freshly unpacked coffee-table bobs over the towers of boxes. It moves swiftly and skilfully through the small maze. It turns upside down and side to side and, resting one leg on the top of a box, does a kind of pirouette.

This is unusual for several reasons.

One: Tuuri has never known a ghost to show itself so quickly. Or bloody brazenly.

Two: when was the last time she saw a ghost just playing?   
Normally, if they are so active that they immediately reveal themselves (which generally only happens with extraordinarily restless ghosts- the kind make you puke nails and slap you around), they do not do it in such a playful way.

What the heck is going on?

Tuuri stands there with her mouth open. She feels very under-prepared, dressed in her over-sized sleeping shirt and dinosaur-print sweatpants. Not at all threatening.

Spotting her phone on a nearby box, Tuuri creeps forward, retrieves it and then retreats into the relative safety of the bathroom. The coffee table turns and pivots over the boxes all the while. It does not seem to have notice its audience. She shuts the door and pushes the towel rack in front of it.  
Climbing into the shower for some sense of security, Tuuri calls her cousin and waits, her heart in her mouth, her blood pounding in her ears.

Emil answers “Tuuri?”

“Yeah.”

“You sound shaken.”

“I am. What are you doing out of hospital so soon?”

“I recovered. They discharged me this afternoon.”

“How’s the kid?”

“Very smug about her new kidney. Tuuri, what’s going on?”

“My apartment is haunted.”

He pauses. In that pause, Tuuri has the chance to hear some of the background noises. Sounds like Lalli is pilling their cat. Either that, or he’s just stuck his bare hand into a blender. 

Emil speaks around a yawn “That’s an issue for you?”

“It is right now. My coffee table is dancing.”  
As she finishes her sentence, she hears something falling over. Then, weirdly, what sounds like a curse in Icelandic. Whispered in a dry voice. A voice that is not frequently used. Now that sounds more like the ghosts she has come to expect.

“Do you want to come over?”

“Uh, no. No you guys need your time. You just got out of hospital.”

“Yeah I did. And how do you think we’re spending that time? I’m literally just sitting on the couch with a bowl of chocolate. There is no romantic moment to break up here, Tuuri. You hear that cacophony in the background?”

“Lalli’s trying to pill the cat?”

“Yep. So if you come over you could help him with that. He won’t let me ‘strain’ myself helping him.”

Tuuri considers her options “What are you watching?”

“That movie with the aliens. The White House just got blown up.”

It is a tempting offer. A really tempting offer. Tuuri could forgo a night of huddling under her sheets in relative terror for a night of lounging on the couch with her cousin-in-law (a term which she is fairly sure she invented just for Emil), in front of a decent American action movie, with some decent candy to keep her from thinking about the ghost playing with her coffee table and the company of her cousin and his cat. Assuming they both survive the pilling experience.

Sounds a lot more attractive to her than cowering in the bathroom for the rest of the night.

“No. That’s ok. I think I should fix this…this problem as soon as I can.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Alright. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Hey Emil? Can you feel it’s gone? Your kidney?”

“Nah. My back’s just kind of sore right now- oh, jeez, Lalli, will you just put the pill in her cat food? You’re going to kill each other.”

Tuuri hangs up.  
For a long time, she sits at the bottom of the shower. The noises from the next room have decreased from huge thumps to gentle scrapes. After she has been sitting there for a solid ten minutes she has gathered the courage sufficient to make herself get up and investigate.

She sweeps the towel rack to the side dramatically. She has to move quickly before she loses the motivation.

Her swift entrance seems to take the ghost by surprise- the coffee table is still up there. It freezes in mid-loop. If a coffee table could look ashamed of itself, then this coffee table would.

“Alright, let’s get one thing straight. If you think you’re gonna scare me out of here you got another thing coming!” her voice sounds strange to her. Commanding and intimidating in a way she has never heard herself speak before, in Finnish, Swedish or Icelandic, the latter of which she now uses “I’ve grown up around things- things that haunt and stuff! You…I don’t know what you are, but it’s not gonna scare me, alright? I’ve seen terrible things. I’ve seen things and had things done to me that are a lot worse than a coffee table dancing all over the place, ok? Barfing needles and getting pulled down stairs by my ankle and having an earthquake centralised to my own bed. All of that stuff. You don’t scare me, ok? So stop trying. And if you’re friendly then why don’t you act like it? Or- or I’ll burn some sage in here! I mean it! That stuff is like an asthma attack to ghosts, do you want that?”

The coffee table lowers itself slowly to the floor in the place where she initially put it. 

“Damn straight,” mutters Tuuri, then she addresses the thin air in Icelandic again “I’m going to bed right now. I swear to God- the gods, whatever it is you know- if you try to haunt me or give me sleep paralysis, I’ll have an exorcist in here, first thing tomorrow morning.”

She stalks off to her bedroom and throws herself onto the mattress, which is still in want of a frame. Covering herself with the hand-made quilt (one of her grandmother’s heirlooms, like the sixth sense she passed down to her grandkids), Tuuri pulls a pillow over her head and makes sure her feet are tucked all the way in under her coverings. No matter how brave she acted to the ghost, she is still not going to run the risk of exposing one, single body part to the air for the rest of the night.

“I’m gonna be ok.” she breathes under the sweltering yarn “I’ll find a way to get along with it. Him.”

A voice in her ear, dry and whispering, accented with a kind of rural Icelandic twang, says “My name is Reynir.”

Tuuri doesn’t move for the rest of the night. Not a toe strays from underneath the quilt until the first rays of dawn paint the new apartment walls.

Ok, so this isn’t what she expected, this ghost. But Tuuri handle it.

Tuuri can make this apartment, occupied already by a dead tenant, a comfortable place, if she just lets go of her expectations and goes with the flow.


	31. 13: Misfortune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri doesn't know why she made it out of her village when so many died. A stroke of misfortune, she guesses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I try my hand at semi-tragedy.  
> And it doesn't work (Oh well)

Sometimes Tuuri considers it a misfortune that she survived.

Only sometimes. Most of the time, she relishes it. How can she not? How can she not be exhilarated with the simple task of being alive when the air is fresh and tanged with wood-smoke, the snow is pure and clean and there’s a boring desk-job where she can goof off for the next eight or so hours without arousing much suspicion?   
But sometimes she hates herself for benefiting from the various twists of fate and fortune which spat her and her two favourite men in the world out of the end of the world, in one piece. 

“I just remember it being a nice day.”

She and Reynir are sitting on the wind-shield of the tank. Reynir is the same age as her, as he is for a small window each new spring. He is a freshly minted twenty-three year old. Tuuri is about to turn twenty-four and can already feel the wrinkles mapping themselves out on her forehead, making plans of attack as to which areas should be made to bag, sag and wither first.   
Reynir looks fantastic. That is to be expected. He has always managed to look some variation of fantastic no matter what’s on his mind or what’s affecting his body.

Alright, so twenty-three is no age to start looking gaunt and haunted by the beckoning spectre of death in the corner of your eye, but Tuuri can’t help but feel old.

Telling this story makes her feel even older.

“Like, you know those days? Those days that are just so nice that you think nothing bad should happen on them to risk spoiling a day when nature has lined up just right?”

Reynir nods, though his expression is quizzical. He has grown used to nodding when he has very little idea what she is talking about – and lucky for him, she tends to explain herself better when she hits her stride about mid-story.  
“Sure. The days where the sky was a really nice grey. A really nice blue. And the air smelled perfect and you’d had a good breakfast. I know those days.”

Ok. Maybe she hasn’t completely lost him yet.

“Yeah, like that.” she tugs at the collar of her jacket “One of those days and I knew it, so I zipped across the street and got Lalli. Did you know we lived across the street from each other when we were tiny?” 

“Oh. No. I guess I thought you two always lived in the same house.”

“Nah. Just over the street, though. We might as well have lived in the same house. So I pick him up and tell my aunt we’re going to the water’s edge to play. There was a part of the lake they had roped off and cleansed completely. All of the kids went down there. What I didn’t tell her is that all of the kids were going to be in the centre of the town for a story from one of the elders. I really didn’t like the elder. She was just… I don’t think she liked me, you know? She had an idea about how girls were supposed to be. I laughed too loud and sat like a boy and burped like them too. Come to think of it, she probably hated most of the little girls in my village because of that.”

“Were there a lot of them?”

“A lot of what?”

Reynir’s voice grows soft as he repeats himself “Little kids.”

She nods. Something knots in her stomach “Enough, I guess. More than twenty. Less than thirty. There weren’t so many teenagers. Most of them went to Keuruu.”

“Why didn’t Onni?”

Tuuri cocks an eyebrow “Why do you think?”

Reynir has to hide a grin behind his hand “He was scared?”

“I swear to the gods. The only reason he left home is because…well I’ll tell you why we had to go. I mean, I don’t know exactly why. Onni doesn’t talk about it. Lalli doesn’t know, or if he does, he’s pretending he doesn’t so he doesn’t have to deal with me asking all the time. Anyway, I took him down to the beach and we just played there for a little while. When I got tired of it I told him I wanted to go back home, but Lalli didn’t want to go, and he wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t leave him by the lake either. That’d be the worst thing I could do. He wasn’t so good at managing his- his stuff when he was tiny, you know? He probably would have wandered off into the woods because he was looking for somewhere quiet. This was before he had the strategy of just tuning everyone out.”

Which he only just perfected. Lalli has come a long way from the grey little guy Tuuri grew up with, or the greyer, quiet teenager he became, or that gaunt spectre of a person Emil Västerström met and changed for better or worse.   
He talks a little more. He smiles a little more. He even laughs sometimes. But he’ll never talk about what happened after they left the lake. They may never get to the point where they can talk about it together. Living through it once is enough, Tuuri thinks. 

With Reynir? It’s different. He wasn’t there and he doesn’t know how Tuuri wakes up every now and then, unable to breathe, because her mother and father and uncles and aunts and grandmother are pushing down on her with all their weight, pinning her to her mattress, their hands stacked on her solar plexus and even the baby- the baby swelling under her aunt’s dress she tries so hard not to think about- the baby is there too with malformed digits and blank eyes and pushing and pushing until finally a scream is squeezed out, the spell is broken, and her airways open once more.

Reynir doesn’t know everything, in short, and it’s up to Tuuri to decide what he gets to know and share with her.  
That may be the most liberating sensation she has ever had related to that awful day since the day itself happened.

“I think we made it because I was unlucky. I mean, it was a lucky thing to get Lalli out from under my aunt’s nose. She didn’t like to let him go. You know how he is. My aunt thought that was a reason to keep him in the house all the time, but I made her see the light for that day at least, and got my cousin out to play and I thought I was so lucky. But maybe it was bad luck concealed as good? I don’t know. He’s alive. He and I are alive and neither one of us would be if we didn’t have the other around, that day.”

Reynir is growing restless. He wrings his braid in white-knuckled hands. She had better just cut to the chase, then.

Tuuri takes a deep breath. Several more. Then she is ready to tell him.

“I was getting ready to shout at him that he needed to behave when the screaming started. It…it was like that noise during the festivals and solstices. The sound of little sacrifices being made in every home, except not chickens and lambs and stuff. Not to the gods. I knew right away the sacrifices weren’t to gods. They weren’t for anything. They were just people dying. So if Lalli hadn’t kept me there I would have walked right back into that. I turned him around and made him run into the woods. Our parents always told us not to go into the woods because there were a few sick animals there. I had my mask, of course, and I put it on before we climbed the fence. Now that I think about it….how safe was that fence? Right where all the kids play, but if it can be scaled by two little kids? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem safe to me.”

Reynir shakes his head “That doesn’t sound safe at all.”

Bless him for agreeing. Bless him for just agreeing with what she says for now and withholding his judgements and pretending he isn’t terrified she is about to admit to him that she had to do something atrocious to survive.

“We went into the woods. I wanted to get out of earshot of the village because I could still hear the- the not-festival going on and I didn’t want Lalli to hear it. But we couldn’t get away from it. I still hear it sometimes. I know he does. On top of all those other dead people whispering in his ear, he was to listen to…to our family. I didn’t know my way around the woods. It was the first time I ever went in there. Lalli’s too. But then we had our bit of good or bad luck again. I put my foot through a pitfall trap and fell right in. You know what Lalli did?”

“Jumped in?” guesses Reynir.

“Well first he braided a rope out of dry grass and stuff and then he came down there and sat with me. He said we would be safe. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I guess…I guess I just didn’t want to risk getting up. I already knew Lalli was a mage. I knew mages sometimes knew things without needing to be told about them by other people. So I listened to him. We must have been there for an hour. I think, maybe, that was the first time Lalli ever willingly came over to me and sat in my lap. I’d made him do it plenty of times before because I liked the idea of, I don’t know, having a cute cousin to show off, but that was the first time he willingly came and sat on me. Last time too.”

Tuuri pauses. This seems an appropriate place to pause. To catch her breath and listen to the steady drum of her own pulse in her ears, which has calmed a little from the roar it was before.   
The story leaves a bitter taste on her tongue. 

“We got unlucky one more time that day. Our grandmother was the most powerful mage in the village. Did I ever tell you that?”

Reynir shrugs “No, but it’s easy to tell there’s some strong magic in your family. Lalli and Onni have it in them.”

“Yeah. Not me, but they got so much of it it’s coming out of their ears. Hers too. She was so powerful. Now that I think about it, I wonder if some of that power didn’t attract the trolls. These were different trolls. I mean, they were festering in the sick parts of the lakes for decades. Almost a hundred years. These were the trolls that had been powerful things before. I don’t even know if the thing my grandmother faced was a sick mortal thing, you know? I think, maybe, the Rash had got inside the näkki of one of the lakes. Whatever she fought, she didn’t win. She came into the woods to do it. I guess she thought no one would be there, but we were. We didn’t have a chance to tell her we were there before she…you know.”

“I didn’t know näkki could get sick.”

“I don’t know if they can. It just didn’t look anything like any troll. Now that I’ve seen more and I’ve got things to compare it to, it really didn’t look normal.”

“So what happened?”

“She fought it. We heard her singing a spell. We heard the thing roaring at her and crashing all over the place. Honestly it’s a miracle it didn’t blunder right into our hiding place. Slash pitfall trap. Reynir, I think about that trap all the time and how lucky we are it wasn’t already full. Lalli could have sat on a troll corpse all day if he needed to. Me? No. I’d be too scared. Even with my mask I’d be too scared to get anywhere near it. Anyway, our grandmother didn’t win. We had to listen to her die…and the troll threw a few pieces of her our way. I only had to see one of them and then I didn’t look at it again because I was too busy keeping Lalli from seeing it.”

She could tell him the rest of the story.

How the troll came and stared at them from the edge of the trap. How she found its eyes and it stared into hers and they just stared at each other for what seemed like years.  
And how she never once let Lalli look at it. 

It wandered off. They wandered out once Tuuri stopped shaking and crying, walked through the pieces of their grandmother and back to their village to see if anything or anyone had survived, and found only Onni.  
Onni had made it through, somehow. He hasn’t told them how he made it. Tuuri suspects there is a reason he was covered in blood (though not a single drop was his or sick blood, otherwise he would have been dead from the amount covering him), but she will not ask until he tells her himself. It might actually be better not to know.

“And we left after that.”

Reynir is surprised by the abrupt ending “But how did Onni make it through alive?”

“I don’t know. He hasn’t told me.”

He is silent for a few moments.

Tuuri takes advantage of the silence to listen out for the rest of the members of their team. She wasn’t all that concerned that another one of them might overhear. Reynir’s Swedish is excellent, so no one has really bothered to take up Icelandic to be able to understand him (except for Emil, who seems to have something to prove), and because of this Tuuri decided she should talk to him in Icelandic. At least if someone other than Mikkel overhead them they would have no idea of what was being said.  
And if Mikkel does overhear? Well, he’s a survivor of especially horrible things. Tuuri had to step over the bodies of the people who had raised her to leave her gutted village. Mikkel had to step over the bodies of the people he had fought and trained with to survey the damage at Kastrup. He’ll understand.

“Tuuri?”

“What?”

“Do you think it’s still after you?”

She is surprised by the question “Why would you think that?”

Reynir’s face is troubled “I’ve heard of stories like that before. Trolls sometimes will see a mage, but they won’t kill them right away. They’ll wait until they get older and stronger. Then they come back for them. I’m not saying Lalli is being hunted, but I wonder if that’s the reason why it left you alone? It had to know you were there.”

“Hm. Maybe.”  
Reynir has just handed her a bushel of nightmares. She briefly considers kicking him off the wind-shield in retaliation, but dismisses the urge. Not after he has listened to her so patiently.

“Where did he go, by the way?”

“Sigrun wanted him to do some scouting with her.”

Reynir grimaces “Wow. I bet that’s going well.”

“In a foreign country and everything.”

“I get why she’s gone with him. I wouldn’t want Lalli on his own in Germany. We know nothing about this place and he has a tendency to attract trouble.”

“Trouble magnet.”

“Damsel in distress.”

They laugh. Making fun of Lalli has become one of their shared favourite past-times.

“What about Emil?”

Reynir knocks on the wind-shield “He’s reading in here, I think. He’s trying to figure out what kind of stuff we should be looking for. And Mikkel went to sleep a few hours ago. Y’know we’re technically supposed to be on watch.”

Shrugging, Tuuri sits up and cracks her back “We are watching. Anything comes at us, we’ll see it.”

“And shoot it?”

“And shoot it. Unless I’m related to it or it’s Sigrun.”

Tuuri tries to comfort herself with the thought of being in Germany. This is literally the farthest anyone has ever gone. For this mission, the third and hopefully not the final, they crossed a sea and entered a land that half of her generation are barely aware existed.  
Would it follow them here, if it is indeed still tracking them? Into a new land where the rules are different from what happens in the Known World?

This isn’t the Known World. This isn’t even the Silent World anymore. It’s like the Lost World or something.

With this oddly comforting thought, Tuuri leans back onto the wind-shield, takes her boyfriend’s hand, and feels safe under this foreign sky for the first time in a long time.


	32. 46: Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannu Viitanen went off and lived a life after the dream. Had a son with his cheekbones too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Complete AU thing here.  
> 1) Ville remained a dog because dog!Ville is my favourite (right after the bear) and I am guilty of favourtism  
> 2) No Rash  
> 3) Modern day AU in Finnish boondocks
> 
> I was re-reading aRTD and I noticed Lalli and Hannu have the same kind of facial structure. I'm sure this is just down to Minna's style of structuring faces, but I am also sure that this family head-canon formed before I could stop my fingers from flying over the keyboard and breathing life into it
> 
> So, I give you Dad Hannu and Strange Toddler Lalli in a short ditty about family

“Has anyone seen my son?”

“You really shouldn’t have to ask that question.”

Hannu sticks his tongue out at Paju. At thirty-five years old, he still finds it is the most effective method of deflecting her multitudinous criticisms.  
“Every second you waste telling me I’m stupid is a second I waste not knowing where my boy went. Did you at least see Ville Jr? She’s always where he is.”

Paju shakes her head “I don’t know where you’ve lost your son, but I really feel for him. You’re the most incompetent parent in the village.”

Hannu smiles at her. This is one of the more gentle things she has said to him about his parenting skills “Thanks, Paju. You know what? I bet he’s with his cousins. They usually know where he is.”

And Hannu usually knows where to find his niece and nephew. They don’t tend to stray too far from the bakery where their mother works at this time of the day. The lunch rush- they know Oona, their mother’s assistant, is half useless despite having grown up in the bakery. She will produce plenty of burnt and supposedly inedible surplus for them to devour.  
Hopefully some of that will get down Lalli’s gullet. Hannu doesn’t know if it’s just the same genetics that have made himself as skinny as a twig that has his’s body refusing to put on weight, or if his son has some kind of dietary problem that hasn’t been discovered yet. He’s been to the village doctor about a hundred times. So often the doctor has begun to think Hannu is some kind of hypochondriac projecting his problems onto his toddler.

Hannu wonders if that isn’t true, sometimes. 

He finds his niblings easily enough. Stationed outside the bakery, as expected, and luckily for him, they have Lalli with them. He notes Lalli is in Onni’s lap with a pang of jealousy. Lalli shuns human contact as a rule. He won’t tolerate being patted on the head or kisses on the cheek from his aunt and uncle. Every time Hannu picks him up, Lalli goes as stiff as a plank of wood. It makes Hannu feel like he’s toting around a ventriloquist’s dummy. 

Oh well. If he can get used to human contact by using the relatively safe-space of his older cousin, that’s fine with Hannu. Maybe one day he will be able to hug his son without the little guy freezing up, like he’s turning to stone.

Another bonus: Onni is reading to him. While Tuuri thrusts her phone this way and that, trying to catch a bar of the cell signal that’s so elusive in these parts it’s like an urban legend, and Ville Jr barks at the swallows flocking overhead, Onni has his arms around his little cousin and is reading to him from ‘Watership down’.   
Ok, maybe not Hannu’s first choice. He has had his fill of talking animals for one life. 

“Kids!” he calls.

They all look up at once. The dog included, who rushes to him with her tongue hanging out and the doggy joy blazing in her eyes. 

“Dad.” says Lalli.  
Melts his heart every time, even if Lalli does say it like a doll, having a string pulled in his back to prompt him to say all sorts of interesting and pre-recorded messages.

Hannu stoops to pet the dog with both hands “Where’d you go this morning, young man? You know you’re supposed to tell me or Mom before you leave the house.”

“I did.”

Hannu frowns at him “Not with your mind. Whatever Joona tells you about telepathy working if you keep trying is just silly stuff, ok?”

Lalli frowns right back at him. They make the same face when they’re displeased. The brow furrows at the exact same angle, the mouth quirks down in the same way, Lalli does the same sceptical thing with his eyebrows. He has learned from Hannu to pull a face that looks as if he is struggling to believe someone would be so stupid as to offend or confuse him.  
Except it is so, so, so much cuter on his little face than on Hannu’s.

“Joona says you’re a non-believer.”

“Joona is stupid.”

Onni snaps the book shut and pops Lalli on the ground, and ushers him forwards with a gentle push on the back “Will you be watching the lights with us tonight, Uncle?”

Stooping, Hannu opens his arms and scoops up his son, then pops him on one of his hips. The bakery gave him some pretty strong arms after the years had piled on- you don’t spend all day whisking and pounding dough and not get some decent biceps- but it has been winching a kid about the size and weight of an average-sized dog that has really beefed him up.   
Lalli slings an arm around the back of his neck and surveys the world from his new perch. He wrinkles his nose. He does not like what he sees, and rarely does.

“I don’t know, Onni. You know the history I have with the lights.”

Tuuri groans. She knows what’s coming; six years old, and already disillusioned with fantastical things and buried in her technology. Hannu hopes Lalli will shun the electronic world for a little while longer.  
“You made it up, Uncle.” she says without raising her eyes from the screen “You didn’t have to fight an evil moose to save the village.”

“I most certainly did!” he retorts.

“He set it on fire.” says Lalli. Not in confirmation; he has just heard the story enough times by now to know the ins and outs of Hannu’s misadventure in the Puppy-fox’s dream.

“Dang straight I did, little man. You hungry?”

Lalli shakes his head. He is more interested in inspecting the texture of the inside of his gloves than what his father has to say.

“Well it’s lunch-time. So why don’t you try?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’m hungry. If I eat will you eat with me?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.” Hannu bends and lowers him to the ground at an exaggeratedly slow rate “I was just going to have some cookies afterwards anyway and I know you hate those.”

Immediately, Lalli’s hands lock around his wrists and tucks his legs in so he can’t be put down.

Hannu tries not to laugh “You change your mind?”

“Yeah.”

“But you know you have to eat some veggies before you can have the cookies?”

“Yeah.”

“Want back up?”

“I can walk.”

The moment Hannu sets him down, he’s off, power-marching into the bakery on his tiny legs. One of the villagers pushes the door open and nearly face-plants in surprise as Lalli trots between their legs.

“Sorry about that!” he edges past the glowering old man that Lalli nearly knocked over “Come back here you little imp!”

He has already made it behind the counter, from the way Onna seems to be cooing at her feet instead of the customer, the way she should.

She looks up and smiles at him “Oh, Hannu, he is just the sweetest thing!”

Yes, Hannu thinks very smugly, his son is just the sweetest thing to walk the face of the earth and the earth had better recognise. But what comes out of his mouth is “Oh damn, I’m sorry! I don’t know how he moves so fast!”

Because he’s awesome is how. Apologies fill Hannu’s mouth in the place of triumphant crowing about how cute his son is and how everyone else should stop having children because, as far as he is concerned, he won the baby-contest.

He finally catches up to Lalli in the back-room of the bakery and finds him crouched in front of the oven beside Johan. Not the evil one. Not the one that poisons Lalli’s mind to turn him against his father.   
They are watching something baked and fluffy rising.

“…and then if you take it out too early the top kind of sags in. It’s like trying to fly a coat with no wind. Some of these will be out tonight for the light-show,” Johan looks up at Hannu and does something with his mouth that is both a grimace and a smile “Are…are you coming as well?”

“Nah,” says Lalli, eyes still fixed on the dough in the oven “Dad never comes. Onni ‘n Tuuri go with me.”

“Actually,” says Hannu, suddenly struck with a pang of fierce embarrassment at his own cowardice “I am going.”

Lalli’s eyes turn on him. They’re grey like the rest of him. He came out in shades of greys and silvers. His hair looks exactly like the thick ice of Tuonela in the right lights. His eyes, too, are basically just chips of glittering ice which somehow wormed into the amniotic sac and were trapped by his eyelashes (a white that makes his face look rather deathly, less than five years after he joined the ranks of the living). Hannu wonders often if it wasn’t his trek into the dreams of the damned Puppy-fox that produced this child, because he certainly doesn’t know how he would have brought someone so grey and still into the world.  
In fact, he might have accused Lalli’s mother of getting with some kind of näkki, if Lalli hadn’t come out with the beginnings of Hannu’s own severe cheekbones buried in his baby fat. 

“Really?” asks Hannu’s grey son.

“Really.” says Hannu “Now, what do you want for lunch?”

 

Six hours later, night has fallen. Attempted to at any rate. It’s rather hard to go completely and effectively dark when the sky insists upon staining itself with lights of every colour, variety, texture and size. Hannu fancies there are a few colours dancing up there that he has not seen before. 

The whole village has come out to watch the show. There are a surprising number of them, when they all do collect. There’s Tuomi with his new baby and Paju, ridiculously proud of her niece, and next to them that gaggle of people that tagged around after Tuomi when he was still a hysterically miserable teenager. There’s Old Lady Kielo in her wheelchair, looking as pleased with the light show as if she herself had coordinated them herself, beside her Johan and Joona and Oona and their father leaning heavily on a cane to allow his crooked back some relief.  
All of the familiar faces and a few of the very old, very familiar faces which have managed to continue to cling to life since Hannu met them in the dreams of the Puppy-fox.

And then of course there are the new faces. There’s that big Danish guy with the medical degree and the face that has always been stoic up to this point. It is now mildly pleased. The big guy has decided he is going to allow the light display to amuse him for now. Next to him is a some woman, some young woman barely out of her teens with hair that looks like a glowing brand under the ribbons of light, and a grin on her face that suggests she may be on several types of medication.  
Hannu has nearly no idea who they are. But under the Northern lights, they seem more inviting, engaging and vital people than he would have previously allowed himself to believe. Maybe he’ll introduce himself tomorrow. Lalli needs a baby-sitter. Not that he’s gonna let the red-head anywhere near his child, but the bearish Dane looks promising.

The newest faces are all beside him. Tuuri and Onni’s parents both claim to be made sea-sick by watching the lights snap and wave and twist this way and that (though Hannu suspects they are taking advantage of the empty house to salvage what’s left of their sputtering love life), so he’s got his niblings all to himself. 

Tuuri slipped her arm through his pretty early on in the show. In between buns and cookies, she tugs on his arm and jabs a crumb-dusted glove at something interesting that he really, really has to see. Onni is much more tranquil, in due partly to his age, and partly because he has a tremendous crush on the boy belonging to the family on the table behind them and he wants to look cool for him.  
Lalli is, for once, content to just sit on his father’s lap and let the world spin around him.

“Which one is Puppy-fox?” asks Tuuri.

She is ready to believe his stories again. She always is, when the spirits come out to play.

Hannu considers the display for a few moments, then points to a reddish streak in a stripe of undulating blue “There he is.”

“The little shit.” adds Onni automatically.

“Language, young man. That’s the Puppy-fox…and there’s Kokko. The big part. Look, can you see her wings spreading?”  
He demonstrates by lifting his own arms in arcs and hooking the fingers to represent feathers. Then, for effect, he mimics a bird’s screech and makes Tuuri shriek almost as loudly with laughter. Lalli bobs up and down on his knee with the activity and watches his father like he’s some kind of strange, if slightly amusing alien.

As if to humour him, Lalli asks “Where’s the moose?”

“Right there! See his horns?”

“No.”

He cups a hand above Lalli’s eyes to shield him from the glare “Here, trying squinting.”

“Oh. Ok. And there’s Ville.”

He points to a part of the lights that are especially animated. Twirling along like no one’s business. Blazing a trail across the sky in greens and purples, incandescent and untouchable.  
Hannu feels a pang. He is not sure of what. Only that whatever it is hits him straight in the chest and freezes his breath in his mouth and throat for a few minutes.

Then he understands.

Ville’s descendant leaps to her feet and starts to bark at the lights. Like she has never been happier to see anything or anyone before. Like she knows them and she has been waiting for them to come back. Hannu would probably spring up and do the same, if not for the child in his lap.   
Instead, he wraps an arm around his son and plants his face in Lalli’s hair, just for long enough to shed the tear he cannot stop, then he squeezes Tuuri’s soft and flabby arm and ruffles Onni’s hair. Confirming that they are real.

For a moment, if felt that he was back in the dreams. His dog, the best dog and friend in the world, back at his side with his boundless love and energy.

That ended a long time ago. Hannu buried Ville in his backyard three days after Lalli was born and marked the spot with a wooden cross. Lalli plays on the mound, which sprouts flowers every spring and the richest patch of grass in the garden every summer, and when the winter comes, there is grass on the mound still, unfrozen and unperturbed by the unforgiving cold piled on top of it.

“You’re a clever boy.” he whispers to his son.

Lalli grunts an affirmation.


	33. 81: Pen and paper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mikkel joined the crew for a few reasons. Intrigue and espionage and judging whether or not his crew members should be terminated for the greater good was one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written a bit like a short-hand report. If Mikkel were a secret agent, as some head-canons go, that got sent into the Silent World to investigate certain things.

The following is an excerpt from the journal of Agent Madsen of the PTCI division (see: Population management Through Controlled Infection), written over the course of the book-hunting mission dubbed ‘the Long Winter’. This excerpt is from the first of the five missions, started Y90. It contains observations on fellow crew members as well as delicate information relating to certain medical discoveries.  
This is the only copy currently in the possession of the PTCI service. Do not burn after reading. Repeat: DO NOT BURN AFTER READING AS THIS IS THE ONLY COPY.

This text has been translated from Greenlandic (Thule dialect)  
(Agent Madsen is a quarter Greenlander on his father’s side; for further information on Madsen family, see the Kastrup Files, Great Bear Wrestler profile or official list of suspects in fall of New Carthage) 

The excerpt will be submitted to the head of the PTCI in a day’s time to determine whether or not Agent Madsen should be allowed to continue to live, as he has requested to withdraw from service and cut all ties to the PTCI. 

 

For interpretation purposes, the following abbreviations correspond to the following names

K = refers to the cat that was picked up along the mission ( now called ‘Tiny Sigrun’ or ‘Siggy’ and noted for single-handedly accompanying every Long Winter subsequent to the one in which she was found)  
T = Professor Tuuri Hotakainen (Skald at the time of the mission)  
L = Scout-master Lalli Hotakainen (scout at the time of the mission  
S= Lieutenant Colonel Sigrun Eide (Captain at the time of the mission)  
E = Major Emil Hotakainen (enlisted Cleanser at the time of the mission; listed under unmarried name at the time of the mission)   
R = Icelandic Ambassador Reynir Árnason for the Union of Mages (stow-away shepherd at the time of the mission)  
(Please note: R may also be referred to as ‘tuna boy’)

 

Day 5

Have reached further into the Silent World than all previous missions by the Excavation Initiative run by the Council. It’s a damning bit of information if you think about it. A tank of incompetents has gotten farther than the highly trained operatives over at EI, with all their funding and their specially bred cats.  
Blame this on S. S continues to prove herself to be a special example of how psychotic the human race can really become when put in situations where there are no constraints. The plan scheduled in Norway in six years’ time will not go forward if S is on the case. Simply will not. She should be terminated beforehand.

On a side note, should ask Magical Resources to test her for possession. Saw her lift the rusted carcass of a car over her head and throw it the length of a street. Whatever she is, it’s not human. Possible resurgence of the demigod race? In that case, would guess she is a child of Tyr.

Had to give R the talk about shooting a sick comrade today. He cried at the thought. R may have a strong magical presence, meriting the attention of MR, but do not believe he has the capacity to be corrupted in spirit by the Rash to use it against other people. Too sweet.   
L, on the other hand, may allow himself to be infected and possessed just to shut us all up. He spent three hours underneath the bunks today while T and I pored over the book retrieved from Medical Facility F. Felt his eyes on spine the entire time.

Day 10 

Eavesdropped on L and T today. Still unaware am fluent in Finnish. Plan to keep them that way.

They were not, as hoped, discussing their grandmother, the late and great Hotakainen, but their remaining relative in Mora. His name is Onni. L seems to think he cries a lot.  
Onni Hotakainen was investigated in Y87 after his defence of the Keuruu base in Finland, which was single-handed and impressive in that he annihilated thirty five trolls without help. Exceptionally strong luonto, possibly Level 8 (Granny Hotakainen was a full level 13, but killed in Saimaa before the MR had the chance to terminate). Watching L closely for manifestations of the same strength. So far he has only made himself sick and sleep for two days due to over-exertion, but am impressed he bounced back from that at all. Lesser mage would have died. Possible level 6 or 7. 5 at the least. Not yet of interest to MR. But he will be. 

Exceptionally grumpy, as a side note. L expressed frustration with R’s hair (which I totally understand, as it is often unintentionally weaponised when he turns around quickly) and T expressed frustration with my cooking (she’s getting a dab more wax in her stew tonight). They then discussed E for several minutes, postulating as to how he keeps his hair so shiny.  
Investigated this early in the mission. Discovered it is just the way he was born- not the work of fairies hidden in hair, as previously suspected.

R still following me like a puppy. Has come to resemble a puppy in other ways- puppyish looks when praised and suchlike. Reminds me of the dogs back on the farm. His clothes still smell slightly of tuna.

Day 12

Attacked. Not nearly as bad as what I (alone, in my head) call the Krak-Attack, but the battle was significant.

E proved himself today, I think. Acted bravely in the line of duty. Followed orders well. In Swedish tradition, burned everything. Also had his first bit of heroism when he put himself between L and a troll, sustained a bad wound, then fought alongside L until the battle was finished. S was so proud I thought she was going to cry.

E : badly bruised, has a shallow scratch about 8 cm long from side to hip (I thought he was going to split when he was hit) and minor lacerations on right hand. Will be fine in two days or so. Have warned him again of the dangers of face cancer to get him in bandages again.   
On a side note, L is furious. Silently furious in his way. Furious with E for almost dying and not being able to understand Finnish so he can express this.

Am tempted to offer to act as a conduit so L can berate E.   
But will not. It’d blow my cover. Also, L would not appreciate the intrusion. Nor would E. Must let them sort out their tensions on their own, together.   
But I will eat my side-burns if those two don’t get married someday.

 

Day 16

K has a name. We called her Tiny Sigrun.

S is pleased. S seems to view this as confirmation of the minion-hood of K and now expects K to follow her every order. K has spent the day chasing a piece of fluff around the floor. Still think of K as Kitty. 

K is getting big. Currently favourite member of the crew.

S noticed I write in this journal daily. Suspected me of making my own list. Assured her I wasn’t. Was squinted at suspiciously for the rest of the day anyway. She may attempt to read this. Good luck to her, translating Greenlandic. Going by physical appearance (not always an indication, granted), S is not a bit Greenlandic and will not understand a word here.  
Even if she does, my handwriting seriously degrades when I start writing in Greenlandic, so she’ll still be stuck sweating over an illegible page.

 

Day 25

Turns out S lost colleagues/friends at Kastrup. Everyone did. Talked about it for a while. First time ever discussed it with anyone, including with family. Mikkela doesn’t like to talk about it because of the brother we lost there. Prefer not to discuss because it’s simpler.   
But with S it was easier. She understood. 

Told me Trond (crotchety boss) hasn’t always been a spinster. Had a husband. Lost the husband at Kastrup. Told her about losing brother, friends, commanding officer. Father.   
She asked me how he died. Had to tell her he just went crazy after losing my brother, his oldest and favourite child.

E was listening. Wasn’t supposed to be, but he overhead us and later came to apologise for the way he’d talked about Kastrup in the first few days of the mission. Told him it was alright because he was young and silly. Must have let the talk affect me more than I thought, because T and R came up separately to give me hugs.  
Not unusual for R; R is a hugger. But T is not. Even L noticed it. Comforted, in his own way, by sitting next to me quietly for a few moments at the end of the day. Then he had to go sit on E because I am almost certain by now they are dating, even if they don’t know it.

Cute. I can still ship it.

Thinking about calling Mikkela. T and L talk to O daily. Makes me miss the farm, the dogs, the family, mom and the twin. It’d be good to hear Mikkela’s voice right about now.

 

Day 28

Discovered old vaccines in Medical Facility E, the fourth of the listed Facilities I’ve been able to find on the mission. S failed, as per usual, to recognise gravity of discovery and called me a nerd for being excited. T informed me she didn’t know I could be excited. Later, privately, she told L I looked like a kid getting a new toy. Wax again for T at dinner.

PTCI will be pleased. But am not sure PTCI should receive package. Knowing them, will infect several vaccines just to kill off chunks of the weaker population. Not sure that should be the way we work anymore.  
R would be considered among the weaker populations. Non-immune, shepherd, rural and as far as the MR know, not magical. They’d infect him without a second thought, if they caught him wandering outside the borders of his home. Shouldn’t be the way we work.

How many mages has the PTCI killed without knowing they were mages? How many people like R; too sweet to be believed, hugger, good with cats and helpful to the end?

It’s not right. It’s probably wishful thinking on my part, but perhaps we’re far along that the PTCI doesn’t have to exist anymore. Engineered catastrophes like the one in Saimaa don’t need to happen anymore.  
Referring to Saimaa: I still wonder if the village the PTCI wiped out was theirs. Presence of Grandmother Hotakainen would explain why village was targeted. Finding it hard to sleep at night.

 

Agent Madsen goes on to explain and describe a series of daily interactions. He continually questions the nature of his mission and shows deeper connections to the crew mates. Catalogues their daily interactions more than his forays into the Silent World.  
Has lost focus and sense of mission by the middle of the second month.

When Agent Madsen returned, this mindset was not obvious for some time. His misconduct was not discovered until the end of the fourth mission.   
By now Agent Madsen is established as a noted public figure (Chief Healer under Lieutenant Colonel Eide’s outfit in Dalsnes, known for his work in the Silent World, married with two children). Termination would prove difficult and is likely to prompt investigations.

The matter may have to be brought straight to the Council at this point.


	34. 29: Happiness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What brings more happiness than new baby? Not the childbirth that's involved, that's for sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To the woman who brought me into this world (nine days late, refusing to come out, emergency caesarean. Yikes! Sorry Mom!), I say thanks. To the women who have or are planning to pop new life into the world in a similar way, I commend you. To the men who are gonna have to watch, I say good luck.

Though her friends have been mentally preparing themselves for this moment for eight months and three weeks, none of them turn out to be very prepared when it actually happens.

Neither is Sigrun, who has grown used to her extra passenger. She has learned to stride even with the protrusion of the new Eide swelling under her shirts and forcing her to keep her uniform coat open, lest the buttons pop off from the strain. She has grown used to the weird, bulbous shape of the little person sitting in her, and how it makes her back ache and bathes the back of her throat in a coppery, sick taste nearly daily, threatening to make her sick.

Sigrun bears the new Eide no ill-will. Who would? It’s not some calculating super-villain she’s growing inside her.  
In fact, Sigrun has taken to referring to it as ‘Potato’.

“Tiny-Eide is like a plant, Mom,” she explained once to her mother, when she had asked Sigrun to stop referring to her future grandchild as a vegetable “A tuber plant, to be exact. You can see the leaves,” she gestured to a belly that was six-months along “But you have no way of knowing what’s under the soil, or me, the awesome mom. Not until the tuber is pulled up. Or given birth to. Then suddenly you have this thing covered in soil and screaming at you and not looking anything like the magical cherub you were expecting.”

“Fine, but we are not nick-naming my grandchild after that dirty vegetable.”

 

As Potato grew and Sigrun’s back-pains became increasingly worse, Mikkel was brushing up on his midwifery skills.

One day, with the intention of preparing herself for the human equivalent, Tuuri watched Mikkel and a few others of the staff down at the veterinary practice help a cow give birth.

She tried not to let it show, how disgusted and bewildered she was “So, you’ve helped women before, right? Not cow-women?”

“Of course. I’ve delivered fifteen children, Tuuri. Two of them weren’t actually meant to be delivered where they dropped out, so it’s a good thing I was there when it happened.”

Her face turned several shades paler than normal “You don’t think Potato will come early, do you?”

“What the Hel is Potato?” asked one of the men crouched by the cow, as he patted its flanks encouragingly.

“It’s the nickname of my god-child.” said Mikkel with more than a touch of pride.

“Potato? Thor almighty. I hope the mom’s better at coming up with names than the godparents.”

“Godparent,” corrected Mikkel patiently “And it was the mother who invented the nickname in the first place- oh, shit, it’s breech. I told you this calf was breech.”

The calf made it. Tuuri did not see this, however. Half a minute into the delicate and gory process of getting the calf out, she fainted and lay in the straw and old blood for more than ten minutes until Mikkel could finally leave his patient and attend to his friend.

 

As he so often is, Emil happens to be with Sigrun when the inevitable happens. Several days early, according to the doctor’s predictions. Reynir, on the other hand, put his hand to Sigrun’s belly four months earlier and said “Wow, this one’s a stinker. They’re gonna be flying out. Make sure you’re within screeching distance of a medical centre for the whole week before your due-date. Oh, they kicked!”  
Reynir then spent the next five minutes cooing at belly-button height, coaxing the baby to kick again and again.

Neither of them are thinking about the alleged ‘stinker’ tendencies of Potato. Emil is watching his partner and seems to be trying to keep Lalli from falling off the wall through sheer-force of will-power.

Sigrun shields her eyes to get a better view of the mage, balanced precariously on the thin bar the barbed wire used to be wrapped around “Has it all been taken?”

“All of it!” confirms Lalli from high above.

Sigrun turns to Emil and shakes her head “Honestly, who the Hel steals barbed wire? You see anything coming?”

Lalli pivots at a dangerous angle to look over his shoulder, at the Silent Lands spreading out behind him. Emil utters a small prayer to gods he has only just begun to believe in that his boyfriend will not be knocked by a breeze and land on his neck.

“Nothing! But it isn’t safe for the sentries up here. Not until the wire’s back. Something little might crawl up.”

“Yes! Something might! So get down from there before something does!” urges Emil.

And Sigrun’s waters choses this moment to break. Almost as if it knows, from the very start, how important comic timing is going to be.

All three of them are staring at the growing stain, unsure of what to think or say.

Until Emil says “Do you need the bathroom?”

Sigrun gives him a withering look “That was not my bladder.”

Lalli says something beseeching to the sky in Finnish, and begins the long trip back to the ground.

Meanwhile, Sigrun and Emil are still a little bit confused.

Clutching the stomach that has only just begun to heave, Sigrun say “But I haven’t had any contractions? Where the Hel is the back-ripping pain? How come I’m not screaming?”

Emil is on a totally different page “Oh my gods! Oh my gods, you’re giving birth! Right here? You can’t give birth in front of the wall! What if a troll comes? Can you hold it in?”

“Emil! This is an infant not a fart! Get me to the hospital before Potato flies out of me!”

Lalli appears on the ground in record time. They each take one of Sigrun’s arms and walk as fast as they dare, steering her as her breathing grows laboured and her steps, longer, more pained.

“Ok, now it hurts,” she mutters by the time they are a block away from the hospital.

People have begun to take notice. People normally take notice of Sigrun because she is tall and loud and well-known in the area for being a badass. They look and notice especially hard ever since she fell pregnant (most of them whispering to each other that the father is absent because he is actually a god), so when she turns up half-jogging, half-limping to the hospital with two of her pseudo-family on her flanks, someone takes the initiative to run up to the hospital and tell them to get ready.

Sigrun stops them a street before the hospital “Alright, I can’t move. I can’t do this. Legs- womb- not gonna happen.” her brow drips with sweat. Her eyes are not entirely focused. She seems to be losing her grasp on language “Can’t do it.”

“Yes you can.” says Lalli “Get up.”

“You get up.”

Emil is about to scream with nerves. Instead, he sweeps Sigrun off her feet and carries her the rest of the way to the hospital, like a bride over the threshold of her new home. A bride that has finally begun to scream by the time the doctors receive her.

 

“How long is this going to last?” asks Tuuri, about six hours later.

They are in the waiting room with a gaggle of other expectant fathers, mothers and family members, and getting strange looks from all of them. Some are trying to figure out their relation to each other. Others have recognised them as the crew from the Long Winter and are wondering if now would be a good time to ask for war stories.

“My mother was in labour for two days with me,” says Reynir, wringing his braid in his hands. He has been clinging to his braid for comfort the entire time. Every now and then, when Sigrun makes a particularly alarming sound from her room just across the hall, he grabs Lalli’s leg. Since he’s sitting on the floor it is the closest thing at hand. “She never stopped talking about it either. How painful the labour was. How annoying it was to push and push for two days without rest. They eventually had to drug her and yank me out.”

Tuuri’s face turns a light shade of green “You don’t think they’ll have to do that to Sig, do you?”  
She sits shoulder-to-shoulder with Emil. Practically in his lap, as if the closer she gets to her friends, the less of the animal-like lowing of the birthing women she will be able to hear.

He shrugs, with some effort, and being so close to Tuuri, makes her shrug as well “Nothing wrong with a caesarean if there’s a competent doctor in the house. Mikkel is there. He’ll get her out of this alright.”

Lalli thinks this is an appropriate time to add: “My mother died in childbirth. I don’t know why. It’s not like there was that much of me to get out.” then he stops, seeing everyone is looking at him in horror- even some of the people across the room “What? Wrong place?”

“Wrong time.” adds Emil, patting his hand.

“FINALLY!” roars Mikkel across the hall.

As one, they all spring up. 

Sigrun has cussed her way through about two hours of the birthing process, but now, she lets out a curse so foul, so loudly, it shakes the windows. To this, she adds: “WHY AM I STILL PUSHING?!”

Concerned glances are exchanged.

One of the new fathers shoots the group a dirty glance and says “Someone should muzzle her.”

Emil turns on him “Did you seriously just complain about the noise? Listen, buddy, why don’t you go in there and shove a watermelon-sized screaming thing out of a hole the size of a sink drain, and my friend can come in here and bitch about all the noise you’re making.”

“You tell him, son!” pipes up a knitting grandmother.

Tuuri’s voice edges on the hysterical “How come the baby isn’t crying?” 

Again demonstrating the critical timing of the Eide family, from across the hall sounds the full-throated bellow of a new born baby. Seconds later, another joins it.

“Twins?” cries Reynir in excitement.

“TWINS?” cries Sigrun in shock “NO WONDER I WAS SO BLOODY FAT!”

 

Sigrun is grey-faced and wearing the largest, smuggest smile anyone has ever seen on her face. When they come in, she is under fresh blankets, splayed out like a dead animal. Cradled in the crook of each arm is a bundle of fabric and new flesh.

“Twins,” she smirks “I have twins.”

Potato and Carrot, as they are swiftly nicknamed, come out absolutely perfect. Not physically- the boy of the two is missing his left thumb. Apart from that, there’s nothing internally or externally missed. They are perfect.

They are a little squished-looking, red and livid in colour, with identical fuzzes of black hair on their soft heads (“Black hair?” exclaimed Mikkel upon noticing it “Where the Hel did that come from?”) and their mother’s unfortunate nose.  
They are perfect

The boy and the girl are swaddled up in separate blankets. Sigrun has her baby girl and has passed the boy over to Mikkel with the instruction to wash the gunk out of his ears before loses hearing or something. While Mikkel swabs out his god-sons ear canals as carefully as humanly possible, the others gather around to coo at the girl.

Sigrun has shifted over to one side of the bed so Emil can share it with her- the waiting left him so exhausted he actually fell asleep on his feet the moment he saw the new Eides, and had to be stretched out next to Sigrun.

“What are you going to name her?” asks Reynir. The first joint of his forefinger is enclosed in the squishy grasp of the baby girl. He is enchanted.

“I was thinking of calling her Potato for a few more months.”

“No!” shrieks Tuuri, horrified “No, this baby girl is beautiful! I’m not gonna let you call her after a tuberous vegetable! Not even for a nickname. She needs something fierce.”

“Like her mother,” agrees Mikkel “And I’m not gonna let you call her Sigrun Jr.”

Sigrun sticks her tongue out at him “I birthed her. I can call her whatever I want.”

“Yes, well I delivered her and I can change whatever you put on the birth certificate when you’re not looking.”

“Brynhildr.” says Lalli.

Everyone looks at him. The boy grizzles in the silence. He seems to want to go back to his sister.

“A Valkyrie, like you.” he finishes.

Sigrun considers this “Damn. That’s better than what I had in mind. I was gonna just call her Johanna or Malin. Brynhildr it is.”

Lalli is alarmed his suggestion has been accepted so quickly “You sure?”

“Course I’m sure! I love it! It’s a powerful name. But hold your suggestions for Carrot over there. I already know what I’m calling him.”

Mikkel lays the baby in her other arm and adjusts his blankets, so his little hands are free to grasp at the golden hair fanning out on the pillow beside him “What are you going to call him?”

Sigrun’s impossibly smug smile gets a little wider. She is inordinately pleased with herself “Mads.”

The high-pitched noise Tuuri makes at this almost shatters the windows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason I absolutely love writing Sigrun as a mother. There is almost no Sigrun that is more satisfying to write than this, for me. This is probably because I'm used to having female characters cast as only mothers and defined as nothing else in their stories. But with Sigrun? Heck, she'd probably strangle a troll with the elastic in her maternity pants.


	35. 20: Fortitude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why exactly would anyone pick Mikkel to be the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a Danish James Bond? Whose idea was that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, playing around with the idea of Mr. Power-burns having a little more darkness to him than we think. It's fun and a little scary to consider at the same time.

When his father dies, all people want to tell him is how he must remain strong.

Like Mikkel needed to be told that. He is the second oldest of a group of seven children and well aware of the burden on his shoulders because of this.   
The youngest of them has just mastered walking. The oldest of them, his twin sister, has just gotten her licence to go work abroad. Her plans have to go ahead, obviously. He had made no plans to accompany her, so it’s not such a huge loss to have Mikkela going out into the wide world without him- it was going to happen whether or not their father died.

Mikkel was planning to stay on for the summer at any rate. Not to fill the shoes of the father-figure that has just died, but his mother will need the help, clearly. There are two siblings who must be bullied through the rest of high-school, another to keep in line as her behaviour vacillates between committed sister and student to committed vandal and miscreant, and then there’s one to get through kindergarten, and finally, the youngest will need some round-the-clock watching until they are old enough to clothe and feed themselves.  
His mother can’t be there for the youngest. She has a farm to run.

Mikkel, on the other hand, has just graduated. He has only vague notions and intentions of what he wants to do at this point in his life. A directionless seventeen year old may not be the best nanny for a growing little girl, but Mikkel does his best, and his best proves to be more than enough.  
By the time the littlest is able to help out around the farm without making more of a chore than she finishes, Mikkel is nineteen.

On the night of their graduation, one of the two siblings that had to be bullied through school pulls him to the side.

“What are you gonna do now?” she asks “I mean, now that one of us is staying on, you don’t have to be here anymore if you don’t want to.”

Mikkel shrugs “I’m not sure.”

“You’re not gonna stay here?”

“No. I’ve had enough of Bornholm for a while. I need to go see the rest of the world.”

When he mentions his designs to travel, his sister’s face grows dark. She shifts her weight nervously. He has only to wait for a few seconds before she spills her secret- it is a notorious trait of any Madsen that they are not able to keep secrets, which is why they stay silent for most of the time.  
Mikkel is the exception to this rule; his silence is down to preference.

“Someone came by after school yesterday. Looking for you. They’re from the Council.”

His heart stops beating for several seconds and only resumes half-way through his question “Is Mikkela alright?”

His sister nods “It wasn’t about ‘kela. I think it was about you.”

Mikkel does not have the time or the patience to worry about this. One of the graduates needs to be put on a ferry to Norway, with strict instructions to behave himself and not to play any drinking games, the littlest of them needs to be moved up to the junior school with the heart-breaking news that she will never be able to go back to her comfortable nursery again.  
By the time they Council themselves approach Mikkel, the news his sister gave him has been almost completely forgotten.

He only remembers when three very well-dressed and well-spoken people approach him one day, while he moves the hay into the barn. Mikkel is in some old, work-worn clothes and has a litter of new puppies fussing around his feet. There’s also a small child, his littlest sister, clinging to one leg and whining for him to take a break so he can come make sandwiches the way she likes them because everyone else sucks.

“Mikkel Madsen?” asks one of the well-dressed people- a woman, with very blonde hair and a very serious expression.

Mikkel is not in the mood for posturing “What?” he says irritably, a pitch-fork in hand.

“I’m hungry!” squalls the sister on his boots.

“Are you or aren’t you?” asks the woman patiently.

“I’m him. What is it?”

“We’d like to talk to you about an opportunity you have to help the world.” says a man in her shadow.

He cocks an eyebrow “That sounds vague and sinister. It can wait.”

“It really can’t-” says the third and final man, standing in the previous man’s shadow.

“Neither can this hay. I can’t work with more than one,” he indicates the child on his boot “Person screaming at me. You’ll have to wait until the hay is put up and whatever the Hel it is she’s screaming for is done too.”

So they do. Mikkel is not impressed by the way they all lean sullenly against the barn. He might be more inclined to listen to them, by the time he finishes up, if they had rolled up their sleeves and taken up the spare pitchforks. It would be more entertaining to them than glaring at him from the side of a barn, as if they still cannot believe some farm-boy has dared to prioritise chores and family over whatever their business might be.

He comes out of the house dusting crumbs from his hands and puppy-fur from his shirt.  
They are waiting where he left them, looking like a couple of spoiled Norns waiting to be given back their toy.

“What is this about?”

“We told you already,” says the woman “This is about saving the world.”

What actually ends up interesting Mikkel is the salary. His family aren’t exactly struggling for money. They aren’t rolling in it either. Comfortable, is the word, and lucky too, but the moment something catastrophic happens, like a storm that destroys the whole barn or a sickness in the family with an expensive treatment, that little cushion will melt away quickly.  
He does not have to think very hard about his reply, which is yes.

They are interested in him because of the life he has lead so far. Mikkel considers the last nineteen years (twenty, by the time he actually stands in front of what he comes to know as the true Council, but who refer to themselves as ‘the Shadow Council’) quite unremarkable. Conversely, the Shadow Council think it is amazing the way he has taken on the burden of supporting his family alongside his mother, since his father’s unfortunate accident with the bear.  
Mikkel doesn’t feel like explaining the concept of suicide by bear-wrestling; he lets that remark go uncorrected.

In the back-room attached to the Council’s office, speaking to a collection of people of all of the currently existing nationalities and many of the ethnicities, he knows something is not right about this “What exactly do you see in me? I was a good student, fine, but I’m not that remarkable apart from that.”

“We believe you have great potential.”

Potential to see what’s going on here, perhaps. Mikkel feels it is well within his rights to let these posers know that he knows what they’re doing.  
“Potential to be manipulated, right? You’ve found a young, strong person with a fair intelligence, who’s obviously able to commit and conform to situations as they demand his attention- my attention. The best thing about me is that I’m in a bad position. I have an upwards of six dependents still relying on me. I have a farm to keep running and little sibs to get through school and others to support as they try to cut it in the real world. I have a hysterically grieving mother leaning on me for support. In short, what I need right now is some kind of miracle, and you people decided you’d present me with one? I think what you see is the potential in me to be made to do whatever has to be done.”

The silence hangs heavy.

“I’m fine with that, by the way.” adds Mikkel.

He’s told he has the job if he wants it.

 

Over the next few years, Mikkel preforms beautifully. 

Kastrup is the largest under-taking the Shadow Council has ever attempted. So, naturally, their best (though not youngest) operative should be included on the mission. There were only three of them. Among them, they were supposed to sabotage the Danish reclamation attempt. It was made understood that the fatality rates should be kept to a minimum. The Danish army has to be stopped, of course, but not at such a great expense as to cripple their forces.

Mikkel finds himself discussing this odd arrangements with one of his fellow operatives. The one he actually likes. The other is a man called Ulf who mutters constantly under his breath and stares at you like he is imagining the best way to cut your throat.  
This one is a woman a year his senior, named Sakura. She has a pleasant smile and cold, black eyes that remind him of ashes gone cold in a hearth. He finds this impression strangely comforting.

They are discussing their mission openly among the other soldiers, though not within ear-shot of them. Thanks to their body-language and Sakura’s frequent smiles, any casual observer would guess they are exchanging a joke or some juicy gossip about their colleagues.

“What I figure about this one,” says Sakura “Is that they can’t afford to have us penetrating into the unclean parts of the world until the ones with scattered populations are settled better. If Kastrup did go well- I mean, with us on the job, it’s not gonna, but if it did, then suddenly everyone’s efforts and resources would be concentrated on expanding into new territory. That’s not good. Denmark would be distracted from its international duties. What we really should be doing right now is cleaning out Finland. That country is basically a giant lake with some islands thrown in. If we could just get it cleaned up, we could defend those islands for eons.”

“I expect you’re right.” says Mikkel.

She rolls her eyes at him “I know you know I’m right. You figured it out as soon as they told us where we were going. You’re a sharp one, Madsen, you can’t fool me.”

“I don’t believe I was trying to fool you.”

“Well good. Don’t. I have five brothers. I know all the tricks.”

This gives Mikkel cause to pause. It occurs to him that he has never talked with another agent about their home-life or family.

“Five brothers?” he repeats.

“Yeah. I’m the oldest.”

“I have five little siblings. My twin sister is older than me.”

Sakura’s smile weakens “Oh, yeah? Let me guess. Your mother died?”

“Father. Left the family in a difficult position.”

“And it was sort of left up to you to run the house and keep your sibs from turning feral.”

“And they approached me out of the blue.”

“Telling you you had potential.”

“And now I’m here.” he concludes “So there is a formula to how they pick us.”

Sakura laughs. He likes her laugh, though this one is scornful, more like a cough than anything mirthful “They pick the strong ones. Hadn’t you guessed that? The ones that have already proved we’d do anything to survive. We have our families to live for and we live by doing their dirty work for them. Speaking of which…I’m due to set up a break in the barrier.”

“So soon?”

“Yeah. My orders have changed.”

“Mine too. They want me to open up a weakness on the front line.”

Sakura sucks a breath in past her teeth “Gods. Right at the front? They’ll wipe out a whole front line. Are you sure they can contain an attack so close?”

Mikkel shrugs “It’s not my job to worry about that. Or yours. It’s just our job to get this done and get out. Everything happens a week from now, Sakura, I wouldn’t trouble yourself with it. By then we’ll both be onto other things.”

She doesn’t smile or acknowledge this in any way. She pivots on her heel and walks off into the crowd, disappearing quickly. And for the next eleven years. Mikkel will not see her until he is thirty-three years old and has begun to understand her doubts, thanks to some help he will receive from an extraordinary group of idiots to whom he is assigned, on the first earnest attempt to breach the Silent World since Kastrup.

It will be his last mission. Mikkel will resign from his post two days after the crew returns, for reasons which he does not see fit to explain to his employers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently the idea of Mikkel having an older twin sister is one that I now cannot write him without using.


	36. 19: Gray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli takes a moment to himself to think about life and letting people in. And why he hates both of those things, sometimes.

The skies tend to be gray at this time of the morning.

It reminds Lalli of Saimaa, in some small way. Without the smell of the lakes, the splash of boats on the water and the shriek of the fishermen’s children paddling in the shallows while their mothers and fathers cast their nets further on.   
Replace that lake smell with old fire and dead things, and the sounds of children and boats with the sounds of the clumsy dead, shambling through a city they themselves laid waste to, and it’s basically the same.

Lalli doesn’t always go in when he gets back.  
Sometimes he’ll climb on top of the tank and sit above the windshield. For no more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, though, because he cannot stand much more of the cold and the heaviness in his limbs once he has come from the Silent World. There is only so long the dawn on the cityscape can keep him entertained when the thought of crawling into a warm bed is competing. Proximity to Emil might have something to do with it as well, though he’s not going to think about that right now.

It was a long night. Lalli trudges back to the tank with his head down and his arms folded across his chest. As usual, the sight of the tank crouched in the moonlight provides a modicum of relief. The real relief will come when he has changed and curled up under the bunk. He is so tired he will not even care if he has to spend the rest of the sunrise eating Reynir’s stupidly huge braid.   
But the thought of being close to other people at the moment? No. He is really not feeling it. 

People are annoying and weird to begin with. They are even more so, after a long and arduous night spent hopping over the wreck of an ancient civilisation while eldritch things rasp and groan at him from the shadows. He does not think he could stand seeing another human face at the moment, whether it’s awake, asleep or even Emil’s.

Lalli needs a moment to himself.

So he climbs up the tank and settles on the roof, cross-legged, his breath steaming in the cold air. 

Dawns are so pallid in the Silent World. It is as if nature itself has become ill and transformed by the Rash. Not all of it, obviously. Much of the old buildings are slowly coming back to life as creepers, plants and trees take root and break apart what little has managed to stay intact. Things are blossoming out there, in the sickness and the rot.  
But the sky does not seem to want to see it. The light that it sheds is reluctant and sullen; not another day of watching this ruin and this horror, thinks the sky, every time it is forced to draw up the sun.

Lalli knows how it feels. He is used to being among carnage and horror. Carnage, from his job. Scouting is not an easy task even in a relatively safe place like Keuruu. The horror, he learned from Onni. Growing up with Onni was no easy task either. He was always afraid of something, always looking over his shoulder. He never relaxed after Saimaa. Neither did Lalli. He couldn’t help it. Onni’s fear is infectious. 

To him, anyway, since Tuuri seems to have barely noticed the family’s only responsible adult entertains a crippling fear of anything remotely related to the Silent World.

Lalli is not afraid of it, per se, but now, as he stares at the quiet city and picks out the shapes of a few trolls moving sluggishly among the buildings, he feels a heavy dread.   
This grey-light disaster-zone is his world. This is what he will inherit from his elders and what he will pass on to his children- which, if he gets his way, will not exist. If he’s going to have to pass any knowledge onto a new generation of Hotakainens they will be Tuuri’s kids. Onni’s too scared of everything and anything to consider committing himself to another person. 

This could very well be the end of the world. If he does not do his job right, it will certainly be the end of the little world of people dozing beneath him.   
Lalli is just beginning to realise he does not want that to happen. Not because death tends to be unpleasant and upsetting to see, but because…well, he’s not sure. He hasn’t had an occasion to be close to more than two people in his life- his cousins, obviously. He is shy even with them. His personal boundaries are something they know not to test. The same cannot be said for these people.

And surprisingly? He doesn’t really resent them for not knowing when it is ok to touch him or try to talk to him, and when he would rather flay all of his skin off than suffer any form of human contact. It’s good to have some people pushing his boundaries, for once, and not out of spite.

While Lalli mulls over the relationships which seem to be forming themselves for his benefit, he hears something blunder in the distance. His heart slows. He lifts his rifle and waits for a target. This campsite is an alright one, he thinks, but it would have been better if he could have found them a grove of trees for more shelter.

He waits until a dark spot crests the top of the slope where the tank is parked. Lalli puts his rifle away and slides down the side of the tank. A shot would be far too loud. What was he thinking? How badly he wants his bed is what he was thinking.  
Drawing his knife from his belt, Lalli plants himself in front of the tank’s door. He lets the troll draw closer. It occurs to him that he should kill it at least ten metres from the tank, so Reynir and Tuuri and their weak immune systems can at least move around the tank without stepping in certain death.

Lalli meets the troll in the middle. It only grows agitated once it realises he is essentially within arms’ length. Feeler’s length. Lalli dodges a grab for him easily and dispatches the troll with a lunging blow to the back of the head. Its skull caves with a noise like bread-dough hitting a stone floor. 

“Ew.” announces Lalli to himself.

Behind him, the door flies open. He turns and finds Sigrun in her sleeping-clothes. Her bed-head makes it look like she is standing in a strong wind. She barks something cheerful in her weird language and strides out into the snow, barefoot, to inspect Lalli’s kill.

Lalli yawns. He side-steps to give her more space, then crouches and cleans his knife with some snow.

Sigrun uses one of the phrases he has just about managed to figure out “Good job.” she tacks on something he takes to be a nickname, though whether it is fond or insulting, he is uncertain.  
Fond, he thinks. Sigrun doesn’t seem capable of that much spite.

She claps him on the back and repeats herself. He catches another “good job!” in a mess of nonsense and allows himself to be pleased for a moment. 

Then he remembers how tired he is. He rises and lopes over to the tank. Mikkel waits in the doorframe for him with the disinfectant and a look of grim determination on his face. His bed-head is less fantastic. Or noticeable. Looks the same as his normal hair, actually.

Mikkel mutters something in his own language. This, too, Lalli can kind of understands- sounds the same way as it sounded when Onni used to tell him to hold still when he had to patch up a scraped knee or administer a shot. Lalli tolerates Mikkel’s fussing for a few moments. He wonders why he felt so violently against human contact a few moments ago.  
It’s not so bad. Not so pleasant, but it’s something he can get used to if he works on it.

Mikkel clears him to go in by stepping out of the way. He calls Sigrun’s name. From his tone, he is probably telling her to stop poking the kill with a stick. Lalli has already stripped off his outer-layers for disinfecting. He grabs a sweater and fresh pair of trousers, and other the other necessity, from a pile on the desk and changes in the closet. After putting the trousers and sweater on the wrong way around not once, but twice, Lalli finally manages to get it right and emerges, clean and exhausted.

He pads into the sleeping-room, steps smartly over Reynir’s braid, and slides under Emil’s bunk for a good sleep. They’ll need him in about an hour to show what he learned on the map today. They might even have him come along for another recon mission, in which case, Lalli intends to kill a mouse and put its dripping corpse in Sigrun’s pillowcase. Kitty can take the blame.

As his eyes fall shut of their own accord, Lalli notices he forgot to close the door. The grey light of the sickly dawn is spilling in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sleep well, sweet, surly prince. You earned it. The others will recognise that some day.


	37. 55: Waiting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When it comes to Lalli's life, Onni can only wait and hope someone will want to share it with him. The results prove to be well worth the years of waiting.

Onni only broached the topic once. 

Tuuri had come back from school, gushing about how pretty the new girl was and how much Tuuri hoped she would be friends with her. From the flush to her adolescent cheek as she described this new, terribly interesting, intelligent and worldly girl, Onni divined Tuuri had just come down with her first case of puppy-love. With Tuuri going on and on about the new girl, Lalli’s silence was a sharp contrast.

Literally. A sharp one. Onni felt a little pang of incredible regret and loneliness on the behalf of his silent cousin. Would he ever get the chance to experience that? Would he ever want to? And if he did want to, what saint of patience would have the time, the energy and the commitment to draw him out of his shell, on Lalli’s own terms and in his own time.  
There were going to be compromises, he was sure, on both the part of Lalli and his hypothetical, possibly mythical future partner. But for the most part it was going to have to be Mr or Miss Mythical that bent and went along with the flow.

With these troublesome thoughts clamouring for his attention, when Tuuri had run out to go play with some friends (which, at the advanced age of fourteen, meant standing against walls and trying to look cool for the benefit of passers-by) he made himself and Lalli a cup of tea and sat down to drink it with him, as was their comfortable custom on slow evenings.

“So, is she pretty then?”

Lalli’s wide eyes flashed up at him through the steam from their cups “Who?”

“The new girl.”

“Oh. I don’t know. Tuuri thinks so.”

“Do you think so?”

Lalli took a conservative sip of his tea. He looked remarkably like a refined old grandmother whenever he drank tea. “Maybe. She’s got nice shoes.”

Tuuri had talked about the boots, but only in relation to them being big, thick, hunter’s boots on loan from an older sibling (obviously to make a good first impression at a new school). Troll-stomping boots.   
Briefly, Onni wondered if his cousin is romantically attracted to boots. He dismissed this thought as quickly as it came. 

It would be better just to get straight to the point with this strange little guy “Do you like anyone yet?”

“No.”

“Do you know what you like? Girls or boys? Both?”

Lalli shrugged. This, apparently, was the only answer Onni was going to get, because he clammed up and did not speak for the rest of the night except to ask for a spare blanket at bed-time.

Things went much the same for the next seven years. Lalli hit all of his milestones. Puberty broke a formerly squeaky voice into a deep, somehow devilish rasp that earned him some appreciative, mooning looks from a few of his contemporaries. But no one ever took it farther than those sappy looks, as Onni hoped they would.  
Lalli was cute, sure, with his silver hair and eyes and skin that was so pale he could blend in with a fresh morning snow if he only stood still. The cheekbones were a bit severe, but Onni thought he looked fine anyway. And from the looks Lalli would get, from fifteen to eighteen, most of the rest of the teenaged population of Keuruu thought so too.

But not one of them ever acted on it. It became a commonly understood fact that Lalli was not interested in romance or the other thing, would never be interested in romance or the other thing, and anyone approaching him with intentions to instigate romance or the other thing had better not waste their time. A frostbitten corpse would be more warm and accommodating to hopeful paramours than the youngest Hotakainen.

Though it made Onni unhappy to see Lalli so alone, he let it lie. He let Lalli live his life the way he seemed to need to and held his judgements to himself.  
If Lalli was the kind of person who wanted to spend his life alone it was Onni’s job to support that, not lament it. Onni himself had done just fine alone so far, hadn’t he?

Actually, no, Onni was cripplingly lonely, and this feeling of intense isolation only got worse after Taru Hollola swooped in and pilfered his family for work abroad. The farthest abroad anyone can go. Into the Silent World. Beyond that there is only Tuonela. 

Onni waited for a few days before he could bear it no longer. Then he got to Mora, somehow intact, and took up his post waiting in front of the radio.

He spent an hour crying in the bathroom the first time he heard Tuuri’s voice. Then, miracles of miracles, when Lalli wrestled her away from the radio for a quick one-on-one conversation with Onni to tell him he was alright, he cried half an hour longer. Lalli wanted to talk to him. This was huge. Lalli wanted to talk to him. Was this the gods, finally answering his prayers that his cousin would actually like and love him instead of just tolerating him? Onni didn’t know. Onni was so happy he couldn’t help but sob some more.

And while he lay on the wooden floors sobbing gently into a towel (embroidered in a curly script reading ‘Hers’), something occurred to him. Lalli sounded a little less sour than normal.

Was it the fresh air? The regular doses of adrenalin? Getting to prove himself in the field?

Or did it come from something else?

That night, he sneaked into the office and studied the profiles of the crew members. Also, the quick drawing (an accurate one at that) of the Icelandic civilian who’d wormed his way onto the mission via a crate of tuna. He stared at the faces, save Tuuri’s, and tried to figure out which one of them might be affecting the change.

The bearish Dane? What would he win Lalli over with, kind words? Hel no. Onni had seen others try to mentor Lalli and get a shoulder so cold it was said to cause uncontrollable shivers for days after the failed attempt at bonding.  
The crazy-looking Norwegian was not a likely bet either. Lalli did not like loud people. The grin she wore in her ID photo told of a person who talks loud and curses louder, and frequently. Lalli would probably hide when he saw her coming.

That left Reynir, who Onni had already decided was a harmless idiot, and the Swedish guy with the amazing hair who, from one look at his ID photo, Onni decided was a dangerous idiot.   
Which variety of idiot would Lalli prefer? He mentioned making a friend, which nearly reduced Onni to tears. If he had not been afraid it would spook Lalli into consciousness Onni would have wrapped his little cousin in a big hug and told him that was great, that was wonderful, just like you, Lalli, and thank god some enterprising jackass finally noticed.

Lalli clearly didn’t like Reynir. That only left the dangerous idiot, whose name was Emil and whose hair was truly a wonder. Onni found himself mesmerised by the glowing likeness in the photo. He even wondered if it felt as soft to the touch as it looked before he realised he was being stupid, shut up the book, replaced it, and went back up to the guest-closet he shared with the cat.

Five months later, Onni realised he was not being stupid.   
The crew were back in Mora, his family, struggling to get out of the bear-hug he’d clapped them both in the moment he laid eyes on them (well-fed, healthy, every limb where it should have been, thank the gods and the spirits), and he was sprinkling their hair with tears when he spotted a glint of what seemed at first to be Viking’s gold out of the corner of his eye.

He turned and discovered it was just Emil. His hair had caught the sun as he stooped to catch the Norns (as Onni took to calling the littlest Västerströms) and looked like a golden brand or some kind of godly weapon.

He looked back at Lalli to gauge his reaction- surely he wasn’t the only one who saw that fantastic hair-whip. He wasn’t. 

And that, if he was not mistaken, an actual smile on Lalli’s face. 

“Nicely picked, Lal,” he said “You hang onto that one.”

“Shut up.” was his reply.

 

“So they were together from that summer?”

“No, of course not. You know how blasted stubborn your father is. He didn’t want to admit he needed another human being until at least the next winter. Then they were together.”

The kid at Onni’s feet, Hannu Hotakainen, is perturbed by this. He has only just grasped the idea that his parents had lives before he arrived on the scene. The thought of them existing independently of each other is a little too much for his mind to handle.

He does that thing with his eyebrows- that sceptical, Emil-thing “Are you sure they weren’t together? Like, in their heads or something? They knew they were gonna go get married and have me?”

Onni shrugs “Oh, when you’re at that age you’re not really thinking about marriage. Your father was still training to be a properly accomplished warrior. The other one still had some loose ends to tie up in Keuruu before he moved on as well. I don’t know what they thought of each other in the spring and summer they spent apart, but a few days into the fall, once everyone was back together, that they, you know. Had a spark.”

He frowns. That is another Emil gesture. Most of his facial expressions he has inherited from Emil. The only shame about Hannu, thinks Onni, is that though he has come out quite cute with his big eyes and dark hair and the beginnings of some severe cheekbones, he couldn’t manage to inherit Emil’s golden hair as well.  
That would have served him well in life. People with great hair are seldom left without things to occupy their lives.

“What kind of a spark? Like Aunt Sig’s?”

Onni rolls his eyes “No, not like a blow-torch. It means they lit up when they were around each other.”

“My dads don’t glow.”

“Yes they do.”

“Ok, sometimes Isi glows, but that’s just his mage stuff. And Pappassen doesn’t glow at all.”

“His hair does.”

“Why do you like his hair so much? Is it because you’re going bald?”

Onni involuntarily claps a hand to his head “I am not!”  
His hairline is still thick. Hannu, the little imp, likes to jab and jibe at his family members. As much as Onni loves him, if he was raising Hannu, he’d sit on the little bastard until all the sass was squeezed out.

In spite of what he’s thinking, he finds himself smiling at Hannu. He leans forward in his chair (a bad idea, because it’s a rocking chair) and pats Hannu’s downy head “I waited a long time for you, you know. I wasn’t sure you were ever coming.”

Hannu smiles, though he is trying to look sullen. He doesn’t like to be seen enjoying affection from his family. He thinks it’s uncool “What? You’re weird.”

“I wasn’t sure Lalli was ever going to have a family.”

With a smug smile, Hannu tips his chin up and squares his shoulders “And now he’s got me.”

Onni reclines “That’s not to say you’re my favourite, though. Lumi, Ville and Mikkel-”

“Ville?” shrieks Hannu in horror “You like Ville better than you like me? But he’s weird! He sniffs dogs and digs holes in the backyard!”

Ville is Tuuri and Reynir’s middle child and by far the weirdest new addition to the Hotakainen family. While his brother, the little Mikkel, with the red hair and freckles and the irresistible smile, not to be confused with the six-foot blond guy from which he got his name, and Lumi, the adorable and slightly evil sister, are both happy to sit still and read books, Ville’s forever running like his pants are on fire and the only way to quench the fire is through play, play, play.

“Let me finish my sentence. I was going to say you’re all my favourites.”

Hannu is no less offended “You can’t have four favourites.”

“Yes I can.”

“No you can’t.”

The front gate bangs open and shut, cutting their argument short. Forgetting that he is no longer in the business of being affectionate, Hannu leaps to his feet and darts down the front steps, his arms open. Emil stoops just in time to catch his son before he barrels into him and sweeps his knees out. It’s a move he perfected, once upon a time, when his own cousins were small enough to lift and carry.

The moment Hannu has been picked up and securely balanced on a hip, his face grows sullen again “You smell like pine trees and death!”

“No, I just smell like pine trees. The death is your father.”

Hannu casts a disparaging look at Lalli over Emil’s shoulder “Isi, did you roll in a dead thing?”

Someone told Hannu that Lalli, like all good mages, rolls in the corpses of trolls before he sends them on their way to Tuonela. He suspects Tuuri. She likes to fill her little cousin’s mind with mischievous poisons, and Lalli more than returns her the favour; because of him, Mikkel now thinks Reynir’s actually three sheep in a people suit and keeps barging in on him in the bath to try to catch the sheep unzipping his father’s back. 

Lalli, bless him, is happy to let Hannu think whatever will satisfy, and there is something oddly satisfying Hannu finds in the idea of his father rolling in a dead thing “Oh it wasn’t quite dead. But it was close enough. I wanted to get home quickly, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to waste time.”

“Lalli don’t be so gross.” chides Emil, though Hannu’s grinning like crazy, then he addresses Onni “Thanks for watching him. You would not believe the troll-traffic going on outside the walls. My gods, it was something to see. No sooner than we had walked a mile in, they swarmed us from all sides.”

“Dramatic.” says Lalli “They were tiny.”

“Yeah but they were fu- uh, exceedingly creepy. Like a moving carpet. It was like the whole floor came alive and tried to eat us.”

“But you weren’t scared.” adds Hannu.

“No, of course I wasn’t,” says Emil solemnly “Because I have your father to protect me. All 40 kilos of him.”

“I’m better than a flame-thrower.” says Lalli, though it is more to Hannu than to his husband. 

Hannu nods, his face serious, as if he is being told some trade secrets.

They file past Onni into the house. As they go, Onni cannot help but think it will be so soon- soon, Hannu will take up their mantle. He’s damned magical enough to be as good a mage as Lalli and brave and resourceful (and dangerously idiotic) enough to be as good a Cleanser as Emil was, and maybe one day the well-respected Major General Emil has become.  
Hopefully not through sheer stubborn willpower, though, as Emil had to do, what with the negligible education he had under him when he started out. 

Whatever Hannu does, Onni will be proud. After all, he waited long enough for a little one from Lalli to dote on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hannu making a reappearance as Emil and Lalli's son. I do have a headcanon as to how he came about (involving the use of the word 'hatched' in the place of 'born') but I won't get into it yet. For now, just enjoy the trans-comical fluffy, domestic shenanigans.


	38. 38: Abandon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun thinks on her team. Something is missing. No, literally, something is missing. Headcount!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every road-trip has that highly regrettable moment where they forget someone (usually the youngest person on the trip, which Emil just so happens to be) at a gas station. This is that moment.

In Sigrun’s defence, it has been a long day. At the end of the day, after her priorities have spent over ten hours clamouring for her attention, her consideration and her judgement, her brain gets a little over-worked. She burns out around 7 p.m. when there is no more work to keep her focussed, and from then on, it is difficult to function coherently. 

“I’m dead,” she announces, the moment the tank door has shut on the twilight “But we need to find a good place to camp. I’m not gonna sleep anywhere near that city. Too much troll activity.”

Tuuri is already waddling into the cockpit “You don’t have to tell me twice, sir!”

Sigrun does a quick head-count. There’s Lalli, collapsed on his bedding, Reynir, buzzing around Mikkel in an effort to be helpful…four, five, six. That’s everyone.  
They have about half an hour of daylight left until it’s going to get too dark to move.

As her muscles cool from the day’s activity and the adrenalin passes out of her system, she watches the city file past over Tuuri’s shoulder. It is so weird to have the sun up at nearly eight in the evening in the dead of winter, but then, the weather has always acted a little sick and disjointed in the Silent World. Not too long ago, the two of them were actually caught in a monsoon. The kind of monsoon you heard the oldest of the old talking about.  
There was one Sigrun knew as a little girl, twenty-five odd years ago. A woman called Minh who used to be a fine warrior, but had retreated to being a fine teacher by the time Sigrun met her. Somewhere in her early nineties. Got around with a cane which doubled as a weapon when she was displeased.

She used to tell the kids of the Dalsnes base stories of a far-away country called Vietnam, from which she had been adopted by her parents (dead, bless them, of the Rash and a bullet for breakfast after the other had perished). She told them of rains that could knock a person off their feet if they were not braced against it. She told them of floods that came so quickly you could be blinking when you saw it at the end of the road and opening your eyes when the water had swept you away.

The Silent World can be like that sometimes. If it’s not throwing trolls at you from every direction, then it’s throwing ghosts or weird weather or giant sea-beasts cleverly disguised as harmless vines.

Sigrun scratches absently at her sling and thinks of how glad she is to be inside for the night. She retreats to the office to allow Tuuri her privacy, and to mess with Mikkel’s.

“How’s the work going?” she makes a point of bending lower over his shoulder than is strictly necessary “Looks boring and nerdy.”

The slightly uncomfortable proximity is totally worth it to feel Mikkel tense up. Resisting the urge to sock his boss. She wonders idly how many times that might have gotten him canned in the past. 

“It’s going well, thank you,” he says with his usual stiff cordiality. 

Sigrun has found she actually prefers it when Mikkel sounds pleased to see her. Or, at least, not inconvenienced by the simple fact of her existence.  
She has found she actually likes him fine, which is an unexpected bonus. Normally she hates his kind- the kind of people who don’t take orders well because they think they know better. But Mikkel, for some reason, is ok, even if he has already managed to land himself on the mutiny-risk list.

She straightens up a little bit “What’s this one about?”  
“I’m not sure just yet. It seems to be a compendium of the ways in which the Rash has manifested itself in people, compared to what their states of emotion were at the time of their complete consumption by the sickness.”

“Huh?”

“The more pissed off people were, the bigger they got.”

“Huh.”

“That means-”

“I got it, I got it. ‘Huh’ is both my ‘ok got it’ noise and my ‘explain’ noise.”

“Don’t you think you should have separate noises for those occasions?”

“Don’t criticise my noises.”

“Sigrun? Can you wake up Lalli? There’s a roadblock up ahead and I need his opinion on which way to go.”

Sigrun feels her heart sink a little bit “Alright, I’ll get him.”

It’s not that she doesn’t like Lalli. Most of the time she forgets his exists, because he’s much quieter and way less of a flashy presence than Tuna-boy, all in his silvers and greys and his sulking silences. She can live with that. Being quiet.  
What she doesn’t like about this situation is having to wake him up. She knows plenty of people like him, who are addicted to sleep. They need their sleep, they need all of it, or their bodies will refuse to function and cooperate. She knows Lalli as one of these people at a glance.

She could make Reynir do it. But one look at Reynir removes the possibility from her mind; he’s on the floor, pulling his braid this way and that across the ground for the cat to attack and death-blow to her heart’s content.   
And Sigrun just cannot make him risk his life to wake up Lalli. 

When you combine the dangerous addiction to sleep and the semi-eerie silences, you understand why Sigrun is not so certain if she wants to stride into the bunk-room and poke her scout awake.  
She does it anyway.

“Hey. Hey. Get up.”

Lalli groans and flips on his side.

“Move it, scout. Do your job.”

Lalli mutters something. It sounds like ‘go away’ with ‘Emil’ tacked on the end of it, which makes Sigrun smile.

“I’m not Emil.”

He must understand some of that, because it catches his attention. He sits up and takes her in. He blinks slowly, then rises, ignoring the hand she offers up to help him, and glowering when she takes ahold of his collar and helps him up anyway. She turns him in the direction of the cockpit and sends him off with a pat on the shoulder.  
If he were a normal soldier, that probably would have been a pat on the butt. Friendly and officer-like. But Sigrun is beginning to suss out her strange scout’s personal boundaries and how wide he likes his space bubble- and whew, is it big!

She sits on the edge of a bunk, overwhelmed quite suddenly by a wave of tiredness.

How many times has she done this? Met a new team and got to know them? And then lost the members one by one by one, until she’s put every single one of them in the ground, and has already begun to forget their names and faces?

How many more times can she bring herself to do this before it becomes too much?

Tuuri’s high-pitched shriek cuts through Sigrun’s thoughts as quick as a welding torch through metal.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

Like a half-crazed siren’s song. An instant later, the tank screeches to a stop.

She springs to her feet, her energy renewed. Reynir and Mikkel are on their feet too, looking at Tuuri like she’s all kinds of crazy. 

Her eyes are huge “Where’s Emil?”

A beat of silence.

Mikkel says something foul.

Reynir says something that sounds just as foul in his own language.

Over Tuuri’s shoulder, Lalli is caught somewhere being extremely disappointed with all of them (himself included) and scared.

Tuuri repeats herself “Where is he? Lalli says- he hasn’t seen him since we got on the tank! I thought he came in behind me, didn’t he?”

“Well, yeah, what the Hel else would he be doing?” Sigrun feels her heart trying to ram its way out of her ribs.

Reynir has begun to look into the closets and under the bunk, as if Emil might be giggling into a fist against his mouth, crouched and hidden, enjoying his wonderful joke.

“Oh sweet Odin,” it hits Sigrun “We forgot Emil. Tuuri, turn this tank around.”

Tuuri’s pale face gets a few shades paler “It’s dark! I think we might have to camp where we were this morning- and detours, you said we shouldn’t do detours-”

“Yeah, disregard that, get your butt in that seat and turn us around before something eats him! Come on! Let’s move! We’re wasting daylight!”

 

The daylight has completely wasted by the time they get back to where they were last. Every second spent winding through the dark roads is a second Sigrun spends imagining tortures for herself in Nilfheim- beyond the obvious torture of ending up in Nilfheim for her idiocy.  
Hel herself should descend from her throne of black stone and dead men’s fingernails to smack Sigrun upside the head with a rib.

How could Sigrun do this? How could she be so gods-damned stupid as to actually forget one of her team members?  
Her right-hand warrior, no less! Her current favourite!

Emil is not hard to find, though. 

He stands in the middle of a knee-high circle of fire, keeping both the darkness at bay and under half a dozen trolls, which pace around the fire anxiously. They are not big. They are not small either. Emil could not take them all by himself.

Sigrun is out the door before the tank stops. Lalli is so close behind her he almost shoots out between her legs.

“Emil!” shouts Sigrun, drawing both his attention and the trolls’.

She has never seen him angry before. As it turns out, he’s a quiet person when he gets angry.

“Oh,” he says so low under his breath she almost cannot hear him “Look at that. They did remember I exist.”

He hefts his flame-thrower, balancing the butt on his hip, and without wasting a second just absolutely blitzes the trolls. The fire around him swells up to at least shoulder-height as it is fed by the bodies falling onto its borders. Emil casually steps up onto the head of one troll, his boot crunching through it, and walks along its spine, high above the flames.

Sigrun has seen this before.  
New recruits scared so badly they forget how to feel fear. It’s like hypothermia- you get so cold you start to feel warm again.

Emil emerges from the fire like a Valkyrie and jumps from the troll. Behind him, the fire rolls up the spine and consumes it.

He has four of them dead around him. His front is slick with dead blood, though it has somehow missed getting onto his face or his hair.

He looks between Sigrun and Lalli for a moment, seeming to enjoy Sigrun’s dumbfounded expression, and those of Tuuri and Reynir behind them, in the doorway.  
Lalli just kind of looks impressed. 

Mikkel shoulders past Tuuri and Reynir “Is he dead? Oh. No. No he’s not. But he’s going into shock. One side, mighty Captain.”

Mikkel breezes past Sigrun, pulls Emil’s jacket off of him, then makes Emil look him in the eyes.

“There go your pupils. Alright, your organs are getting ready to turn off. Let’s fix that. Tuuri! Get me the foil blanket!”

He scoops Emil up and carries him back to the tank, pausing only for a quick spritz of disinfectant.  
This leaves Sigrun and Lalli outside to stare at Emil’s handiwork.

Sigrun tries to work it out in her head. Emil was angry, not scared. He knew it was a mistake. He knew it was not a deliberate attempt to leave him to the mercy of the Silent World- which means he knows he is safe. Kind of. Among people he can trust, at any rate, trust to keep him alive and worry about him and the like.  
If they haven’t forgotten he exists.

And in the absence of these supposedly reliable people, Emil had no choice to but to turn into himself and see what he could find in the way of bravery and the willpower to eke by until rescue showed.  
Look what he found. 

Sigrun turns to Lalli and says “That may be my worst captain moment ever.”

For the first time since the trip began, Lalli says the first word (which is not a name) that she can understand “Yep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was going to be slap-stick humorous, but I also kind of wanted scary/scared-mad Emil. And I wanted to see what Emil might do if he has no one else to rely on.  
> As it turns out, I may head-canon him as a tad more competent than the reality would be.


	39. 53: Keeping a secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun is an only child. Probably. Mikkel is pretty sure Sigrun is an only child, but it can't hurt to check

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just messing around with a semi-fun head canon.

Something has been bothering Mikkel for the last four years.

That is to say, Reynir and Sigrun have been bothering him for the last four years. Not because Sigrun is loud and prefers to think with her fists than her brain, and because Reynir is always underfoot, even though he is well over six feet tall and really should know better by now.  
It is something far more confusing than that. 

What bothers Mikkel about Reynir and Sigrun are things which he, individually and separately, actually appreciates about their characters. From the moment he met Sigrun (a few days before Reynir popped out of the rations asking about his own home-town), he liked her laugh.   
This was because Mikkel was prepared to look for something to like in Sigrun- he knew if he didn’t, he was going to go crazy and probably try to put in her a shallow grave within the first week of the mission. It took him a while longer to realise he also liked Reynir’s laugh, because when he met Reynir, he was considering which parts of him might be the easiest to cook if the crew were to have to cook parts of him to make up for the rations he had cost them. It was only later that Mikkel began to notice little things about Reynir that he enjoyed. 

And it takes Mikkel another two years to realise the laughs are the same.  
Loud, joyful, confident and infectious. Different voices, but a laugh so similar it might as well be an echo.

Then there was the hair. Plenty of people have red hair. Not many, though, have the same, deep, offensively red shade of hair that Sigrun and Reynir share, nor do they have the light brown elbow-freckles that Sigrun managed to hide until spring of the first year Mikkel knew her.  
When he saw her exposed elbow and compared it to Reynir’s, he saw them equally freckled. Granted, it was the only part of the Sigrun that was freckled (not that Mikkel cares to investigate further), and Reynir had a liberal splash of freckles on most of his limbs. 

Plenty of people are freckled. However, plenty of people do not have the exact same triple-line of freckles exactly on the inside of their elbow, in the same size and colour.

Mikkel gets cause to become extremely suspicious when he discovers they are both hysterically allergic to bee-stings.  
They are patrolling the slowly expanding borders of the Dalsnes compound, chatting about inconsequential things. Mikkel’s wife is pregnant. Tuuri has just been made a full-professor at her university (and it only took her two years, which is a feat equalling wizardry). Emil’s hair is long enough to brush his shoulder blades and Lalli complains he nearly suffocates on the stuff on a nightly basis.

Reynir is just minding his own business when a delicate buzzing noise fills the air.

At once, both Sigrun and Reynir freeze. In the same instant they have both thrown themselves flat on the ground, their hands covering the backs of their necks.

“What the Hel?” says Tuuri, which is what everyone is thinking.

“If I get stung I swell up and almost die!” barks Sigrun through a mouthful of spring grass.

“Me too!” echoes Reynir.

“Get it away!” they finish in an eerie unison.

Emil obliges with a quick, warning shot from his flame-thrower to send the bee on its merry way. The two of them brush themselves off and continue on casually, but Mikkel has had enough.

Once they are back in the Dalsnes area, he makes his way straight over to the archives. The man staffing the archives today is filing his nails to points when Mikkel comes in and nearly puts an eye out in his haste to salute.

“Sir!”

“At ease, librarian. I need to see the medical records. Will that be alright?”

The man nods enthusiastically. His eyes have taken on that annoying, dreamy quality a lot of people get when they realise who Mikkel is.  
Mikkel hates being famous.

The man guides him towards the back of the draughty room, through leaning stacks of boxes and groaning bookshelves that are probably older than Mikkel. Some of the files look like they have not been touched in decades. Others are in a state of disarray, with contents spilling everywhere and onto the floor.  
Mikkel resists the urge to criticise in front of the librarian, but gods, is this a messy set of archives. If it were up to Mikkel, he’d have all of the librarians flogged for being so careless with valuable documents.

When they have reached the (thankfully, relatively neat) medical section, the man manages to retreat a few steps before his question comes bursting out “Sir, is it true you killed a Rash-sick bear and slept in its corpse for warmth on the second winter, when you got caught in that blizzard away from the tank and everyone thought you were dead?”

Mikkel tries not to roll his eyes “No, it’s not I’m afraid.”

“Oh.” the librarian retreats completely, a little crestfallen.

“It was an angry moose, and it wasn’t sick. It was just an asshole.” he mutters under his breath, once he is sure the librarian is out of earshot.

It doesn’t take Mikkel very long to find what he is looking for; there are not many people named Eide in the Norwegian army. There are only three, in fact, and they are all related.  
He ignores Sigrun’s file and reaches for her mother’s. The women are generally the best bet. When it comes to the Dagrenning programme, women generally feel more obligation to donate and spread their immunity than men. Mikkel still has no idea why; it’s far easier for men to do than women, but there you go.

General Eide’s (the Mrs) file is impressive. Not as thick as her daughter’s, but almost there. Mikkel surveys a catalogue of old injuries with mild interest until he finds what he is looking for.

Dagrenning programme. Donated to a couple in Iceland, just under twenty-five years ago. Seems like the experience was quite damaging; there are a few files attached, transcripts from one of what must have been many counselling sessions.

He only reads a few lines to know what he needs to know.

 

Eide: There are only two outcomes, when a couple doesn’t get back into contact with their donor to let them know how the child is getting on. I know they were pregnant. I heard that much at least. I know the child must have been born, because the bureaucracy tend to consider your eggs defunct if the pregnancy is miscarried or goes wrong. I haven’t been told I’ve been removed from the list of donors. That means there are only two options.

Counsellor: what do you believe those options are?

Eide: Either the baby died or it isn’t immune. I’m not sure which one is worse.

 

Mikkel snaps the file shut.

He thinks on the last time he saw General Eide (the Mrs), and how contented she looked. Covered in troll-blood, waving a battle-axe over her head in a greeting to her daughter. Reynir was at Sigrun’s side, then. He’s been her pet mage ever since he graduated from the academy in Iceland.  
Whatever happened to General Eide, she has surpassed or made her peace with the pain it caused her.

It’s no business of Mikkel’s to go rooting around in the history of a pair of families that are not his.

He leaves the archives quietly, thinking of how priceless Sigrun’s expression would be if she discovered she had a half-brother. Not nearly as priceless as the transcendent joy that would light up Reynir’s face.   
Mikkel will have to be happy with just imagining those expressions.


	40. 52: Deep in thought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun wonders if she's weird for having younger friends. These friends aren't very helpful when she asks them what they think.

Sigrun has begun to wonder if she is not a little bit odd.

Her job is ordinary enough. The pay is certainly nothing to brag about, but whose pay on the force is something to aspire to? She’s a detective. A damn good one at that, she supposes, because she tends to catch whoever it is she has in her sights, and generally a few more besides.

What is strange about her is probably her friends. Being that most of them were pre-teens when they met. She was on her way to the police academy. They were on their way to middle-school. And yet, it made sense. She would have rather spent her time helping some kids with their homework in the coffee-shop where Mikkel worked in those days than roaming the town at night with her fellow trainees, drinking, partying, staying out late and getting into trouble.  
In fact, she actually far preferred taking Tuuri to the library and helping her chose some early horror classics to cut her young reader’s teeth on than even hanging around her colleagues.

Her age contemporaries in general were just kind of boring. Save Mikkel, of course, who was then and is now her best friend. Her wing-man. Her back-up. Helps her bury bodies and stuff. He would, that is, if there ever was a body which needed to be swiftly disposed of.  
But Mikkel remained her only real adult friend until the kids grew up enough to be classed as adults.

Lalli’s voice broke, producing such profoundly deep and satanic results that Sigrun cracked up every time he spoke, and put him in a sulk so that he refused to talk in front of her for a few weeks afterwards. Tuuri got her period and started to explore the various uses of cosmetics. Reynir had a growth spurt every few months until he was ducking through doorways and out-growing his shoes regularly.  
Puberty hit Emil like a truck. A truck full of sexy, that is. If he had been Sigrun’s age and she had not known him, she might have tried to get with him. But he is not her age contemporary. He is eleven years younger, too goofy for Sigrun to consider as a partner (she needs someone serious to balance her out) and never mind that she basically raised the kid while his negligent parents went skiing and sky-diving and whatever else it is rich parents do to forget about their child.

Also, Emil is gay. One hundred percent rainbow, as he put it when he came out to her. 

Sigrun brings this strange predicament up one day, in a bar. Now that all of her friends are past eighteen and interested in going to bars, she has re-discovered her college habit of going out after work (part-time, back then, and now it’s after a long day of busting the bad guys) for a few drinks. She still doesn’t drink much when she gets there. Tends to be a light martini or a light beer.   
Hard alcohol makes her gassy.

“Do you guys think I’m a freak?” she asks.

It’s an out-of-the-blue question in ordinary circumstances. Sigrun’s friends, however, don’t much care for ordinary circumstances.

“Yes,” says Tuuri without hesitation “Why, by the way? Why ask?”

Sigrun shrugs “I don’t know. I’m just thinking.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.” says Reynir, who tends to develop a snarky sense of humour after his first beer. He’s onto his second, so the fond jibes and impressions are on their way.

“Thinking about what?” prompts Mikkel “What in particular has disturbed you?”

Sigrun has never known a man to remain so eloquent when he’s been drinking. Not that he has gotten more than a few sips in of that hideous scotch-thingie he insists on imbibing. Still, she has fond memories of watching him stand up on a table, after about five beers, and recite Macbeth’s soliloquy about the walking shadow without missing a single word or breaking iambic pentameter.   
He’s weird too. 

She shrugs “I don’t know.”

“Are you really so drunk you’ve already forgotten what you were going to say?”

Sigrun raises an eyebrow at Mikkel “No, I just don’t know how to explain myself.”

“With words.” suggests Reynir helpfully.

“You don’t say Reynir. Alright, I’ll cut to it. Look around, what do you see?”

Emil looks “My boyfriend.”

“I said look around, not directly to your left.”

“Us?” suggests Lalli. 

“Yes!” Sigrun points a little to enthusiastically, and almost knocks Tuuri’s drink into her lap. About five hands shoot out to catch it and right it before a drop can be spilled.

“Yes,” she continues “That’s the problem I’ve got. Us. We. You people.”

“What’s wrong with us?”

“Absolutely nothing, Emil! But am I weird for noticing that? I mean, back when you guys were tiny?”

Comprehension dawns on each face. Except for Reynir, who has suddenly become entranced by his own fingernails and squints musingly at each quick and the hang-nail on his left pinkie. 

“You mean you think you’re a freak because all of your friends are, like, eleven years younger than you?” surmises Tuuri.

Mikkel frowns “I keep forgetting I’m twelve years and four months older than most of the people here.”

A year and four months older than Sigrun herself. They started college at the same time, however, since Mikkel had to take a year off to nurse a dying father and comfort a mother who had begun to grieve early.  
Sigrun lived across the hall from him and played loud music. He came over to inform her about how difficult it was to concentrate on his studies while she was blasting Sigur Ros at the top volume setting on her stereo. Two days later, they had agreed they would house-share when the freshmen moved out next year.

Sigrun is beginning to get a headache. Why did she start to think about this? Why has she had to convince herself that this sort of thing matters?

“That’s not so weird. My grandparents were thirteen years apart when they got married.” says Emil.

“Yeah, but I’m not married to you. He is.” She points to Lalli.

Lalli slings an arm around Emil’s shoulder, as if confirming this statement, though the very next thing he says is: “We’re not married.”

“Feh. I give it two more years. What I’m trying to say, is it weird that I was besties with a bunch of little kids when I was a police trainee? I mean, if I did that because I was seeking some source of,” she flaps her hands helplessly for a few moments, and Tuuri grasps her cup firmly to keep it safe from the flailing “Innocence! Kids and kittens are the most obvious place to go for that stuff, so why didn’t I just start going to a cat café?”

They all ponder this for a moment. It is kind of difficult to have an existential discussion with the speakers overhead blaring out some top-charts pop song and a man behind them weeping into a friend’s shoulder and a neat scotch about how his girl left him for his cousin.

Unexpectedly, Lalli is the first to come up with something “Kittens can’t ask you about your day.”

“Never stops me from telling Kitty all about mine.” Reynir smiles at the thought of his cat “I should text her.”

He takes out his phone and starts searching through his contacts for his cat’s number. Tuuri stops him when she sees that he is doing this earnestly, then surreptitiously adds to his drink a squirt more of water from the bottle she brought.

“Ok, fine, Reynir talks to his cat. I talk to our cat all the time. But when I’ve had a shitty day, the cat doesn’t ask me if he can drown my sorrows in ice cream and Wes Anderson movies.” points out Lalli “My human- my boyfriend does that.”

Emil gives him a look “Did you just call me your human?”

“No.”

“I just heard you call me your human.”

“Must be the music. It’s too loud.”

Emil looks over to Tuuri “Are you sure the Hotakainen clan aren’t all aliens? Because this is the fifth time he’s referred to me as ‘my human’ as long as we’ve been together.”

“You’ve been together since you were sixteen. That’s a long time to…to make that particular, repeated verbal slip.”

“You’d think Lalli would have learned better.”

“You’d think.” agrees Lalli stoically.

Sigrun clears her throat “’scuse me, but this is about my insecurities! Not whether or not Lal and short-stuff are aliens, which I’m pretty sure they are.”  
Reynir gasps and gestures across the room “Oh my god! Is that Gerard Butler?”

Everyone turns around.

“No,” says Mikkel “That’s a seeing eye dog.”

“Are you sure?” Reynir squints “Oh, you’re right. But the hair is the same colour.”

“No it’s not. Reynir, give me that. You’ve been downgraded to sparkling water for the rest of the night. You’re too drunk.”

“I am not!” protests Reynir lightly “You worry too much, Tuuri-bear.”

Here come the pet names. In a few moments, he will mistake Mikkel for his mother, make a move on a hatstand or some other piece of similarly inanimate furniture, then spend the rest of the night drowsing pleasantly in Tuuri’s lap.  
Reynir is the poster-child for light-weights.

To re-capture her friends’ attention, Sigrun is forced to clear her throat again, this time, so commandingly and violently that it shuts everyone up in one fell swoop.

She had better just pose it to them simply before Reynir sets his sights on a curvaceous lamp “Am I too old to be friends with you guys and have it not be creepy?”

“Naaaah!” 

“Oh, perish the thought.”

“Maybe.”

“Lalli!”

“What? I’m being honest.”

“So I am a little bit creepy?”

Lalli holds a hand up with fingers spaced a hair’s breadth apart, to demonstrate how truly little the ‘little’ he quoted is “Just a little.”

Sigrun smiles “Ok, as long as it’s just a little. I guess I can live with that.”

Now that they’re adults, Sigrun guesses she could be considered average again. What’s so unusual about a thirty-something being friends with a bunch of twenty-somethings? They’re insightful, caring and entertaining. They’ve meant more to her than almost any friend her own age she has ever had.  
Why worry about it?

Why not just enjoy the simplicity of their friendships before marriages, children and moves out of the country start to complicate life?

Reynir gasps again “Oh my god! Is that Mia Farrow?”

And, once again, on the off-chance that Reynir has really spied the star of ‘Rosemary’s baby’ rather than another seeing-eye dog, they all turn, and Sigrun cannot stop smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personal headcanon: Reynir is such a light-weight that literally smelling alcohol can make him dizzy. Three beers and he'll be so smashed that he cannot function without assistance. This may or may be not be based on a friend of mine who is also very, very easily drunk


	41. 73: I can't.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emil isn't sure he can think of a good way to say goodbye. Lalli's got it covered, though.

Emil knew this day was coming. He just didn’t know it was going to get to him so fast.

“I can’t believe we got cleared,” Tuuri keeps saying “I mean, gods, I can’t believe it! Mikkel, you were so charming.”

Mikkel looks relieved. It’s unusual to see anything on his face but a stoic refusal to be impressed or amused “Yes, I believe I was.”

“And Sigrun! You actually sounded so professional!” Tuuri lets out a slightly hysterical squeal of glee and grabs Sigrun’s arm, hanging off it like a child on their parent’s sleeve “You sounded like a Captain and everything!”

Sigrun is trying not to make it obvious, how pleased she is with herself. She really did preform quite admirably in front of the Council. Emil suspected she had a serious and professional persona lurking somewhere underneath the unrestrained goofiness that he was accustomed to, but it shocked him to see Serious-Sigrun rear her head all the same. How could she change her faces so seamlessly? Not a trace of bravado in the Council’s office. And now that they’re outside and sure of their success, she has the look on her face that she gets when she has just taken a troll down single-handedly, and wants congratulatory high-fives.

“I am a Captain, stubby. I’ll be kinda glad to get back to that, I think. With my souvenirs.”

She slings an arm around Mikkel’s shoulder and tosses a grin over her shoulder, at Emil. She is very pleased with herself.   
Went out on a mission into the Silent World, collected some books, killed some trolls, it was a big success- that’s all consequential to her, Emil has figured, but what is really important is that she discovered a group of people she enjoys working with. So of course, she has begun to collect them. Mikkel is going back to Dalsnes with her- the base doctor there keeps stitching lost fingers back onto the wrong hand, and Sigrun argues that even Mikkel’s suturing skills aren’t that bad.

And as for Emil, Sigrun has basically adopted him as a protégé. He suspects she is going to try to tack ‘Eide’ onto his last name and call him a long-lost brother once they get back to Dalsnes. 

His only problem with the situation is that she keeps referring to him and Mikkel as ‘souvenirs’, so he kind of feels like a maiden being pilfered from her quaint village by grabby Vikings.  
Oh well.

That is the extent of his problem with Sigrun anyway. There are two others, the first of which is entirely unexpected; he misses Reynir. Somehow, the near-useless civvie grew on him, like a clinging, reddish, over-helpful fungus. Emil has found himself missing Reynir looming over him with his happy smile and his light, bird-like laughs and his fantastic, superb hair. Emil has new callouses on his fingers from the amount of time he spent helping Reynir braid his hair on the mission.

With luck, Reynir will be back next year, trained and able to communicate. Emil has plans to plough through three years of basic Icelandic before the next winter when the second mission will set off. He knows he can do it if he puts his mind to it, because if he can’t, then he’s going to be stuck in the same situation of not being able to talk to Reynir.  
He’d rather eat his own feet than spend another winter with Reynir chattering in his ear and not having the slightest idea of what is being said to him.

And, of course, he has heard from Tuuri that Lalli has already begun to brush up on his (non-existent) Icelandic. 

That is his second problem.   
His second problem walks in stride with him. He is quiet, his face composed. He didn’t understand most of what was being said until he was questioned in his own language by a Finnish mage, like him, who seemed very impressed to be talking to a surviving member of the Hotakainen family. Apparently, their grandmother was a big deal in the mage-world, which, thanks to some spectacular displays from both Reynir and Lalli this winter, Emil no longer has any trouble believing exists.

At any rate, Lalli has become his second problem.

 

Tuuri comes into his room later that night. They are staying in a military base on the edge of the town. Emil is sharing with Lalli, who’s dead asleep on the other side of the room. He feels as if Reynir should be squeezed onto the edge of Lalli’s bed. He got so used to seeing the two of them cramped up on the floor, usually with Reynir’s absurdly long limbs flung all over Lalli at awkward angles, so Reynir looked to be giving him a tender embrace while Lalli looked to be struggling away from it with all of his might- the latter of which was almost always true.

She glances at her cousin long enough to confirm that he is asleep, then sits down on the edge of Emil’s bed.  
“I want to say thank you.”

Emil deposits the book he was reading (‘Crash course in apocalypse-survival for the useless and untrained’) on his nightstand “For what?”

Tuuri nods towards her cousin “I’ve never seen him like that before. I’ve never seen anyone like you before, for that matter.”

Nervous, Emil sits up and pulls his covers up to his shoulders. He feels like he should conceal himself for some reason “What do you mean?”

“I mean…I mean you’ve been so patient. And he’s been a socially malformed asshole.”

“No he hasn’t.”

Tuuri cocks an eyebrow.

“Ok, maybe a little-”

“Maybe a lot, you mean. He has been…but a lot less than normal. He’s been trying so hard this winter. I mean…I’ve never seen him just…just try so hard to make himself get used to people before. He doesn’t like people. People usually don’t like him because he spends so much time away and on his own, and even if he didn’t, he’d still be strange to them. He’s difficult and…well he doesn’t say it, but I know he likes having you around. I think you just…you just don’t judge people, you know? Not in a way that matters. You get hung up on stupid stuff sometimes, but when it comes to what’s important…you just don’t judge. So thanks for that. Thanks for being Lalli’s friend.”

Emil swallows. His throat feels thick and swollen “How could I not be?”

She lets out a soft and bitter laugh “Pretty easily, Em.”

Em. He wonders how long it will be before he hears that nickname again- Mikkel and Sigrun don’t use it, so probably not until next winter.

“You don’t have to thank me for…” how does he describe to her what he has actually come to view Lalli as without giving himself away?  
He can’t. He won’t.

“For anything.” he finishes.

“But I want to.”

Tuuri takes his hands and squeezes them. Her smile reaches her eyes and makes them radiant and glowing, not unlike the full moon peering in through the uncovered windows.  
The Hotakainens all have the same eyes. He has seen Onni’s too, has had all winter to look at Tuuri’s and can say without a doubt that Lalli wears those weird silver eyes the best.

“It’s alright.” he says.

Tuuri leans over and gives him a hard hug “Oh, gods. I know it’s sappy, but I don’t want to get on that train tomorrow.”

Emil snorts, patting her on the back “You think that’s sappy? I can’t even tell you how much I miss Reynir right now.”

“Oh my gods! I know, right? I miss his stupid smiling face so bad!”

“He’s gotta come back next winter with us.”

Tuuri nods enthusiastically “Tell you what, whenever he writes to me from the academy in Iceland, I’ll translate it into Swedish and send it on to Dalsnes so you and Sig and Mikkel will know what’s going on with him. Sound good?”

“Yes. That’d be great. If I can make myself work hard enough, I should at least be able to talk to him next winter.”

He and Tuuri talk about Reynir in undertones for just over half an hour. The excitement of the day catches up with Tuuri and makes her eyelids heavy. She excuses herself with a promise to wake them both up, bright and early tomorrow, and departs with one more hug. 

Emil tries unsuccessfully to sleep for an hour afterwards. He faces the wall while he tries. Finally, he decides he will no longer kid himself about how he’s going to spend this night- sleepless and increasingly dejected- and turns over onto his side, facing Lalli. Lalli’s staring at him, his eyes at half-mast. 

After a moment’s consideration, Emil scoots to the far edge of his bed and gestures to the spot he has just vacated. Lalli brings his own pillow and curls into Emil’s side without hesitating.  
Emil is asleep within minutes.

Lucky for them, or perhaps, unlucky for Emil, Lalli is up and moving by the time Tuuri bursts into their room. 

She speaks cheerfully to Lalli in Finnish. This fails to do anything to improve his outward mood. Sombre as a grave-digger. Emil tries to pretend he does not feel like an open and weeping wound, both for his sake and for Tuuri’s.   
He just tells himself that every second he gets to spend with Lalli until the next winter is one that should not be wasted on feeling sorry for himself and for a parting which has not even been completed yet. All morning, through the last minute checking of luggage and Tuuri’s frantic search for a travel paper, which turns out to be folded safely in one of her pockets, Lalli sticks close to him. Emil turns the favour. So much so that their shoulders are often together and they keep lightly tripping over each other’s feet.

In the end, though, Sigrun has arranged it so they will not have to walk the Hotakainens to the train.They will instead accompany a military outfit also bound for Keuuruu, who will see to it that their younger countrymen are delivered safely back into the Finnish bosom.  
Emil suspects she did this because Mikkel is not allowed within a hundred metres of this particular train line, but thinks the better of complaining.

He will see Lalli next summer, he tells himself, and by that time, Lalli won’t have any cause to think him a useless poof. Hopefully.

Just when Sigrun is finishing up with the mandatory war-stories-swap with her fellow soldiers and Emil is steeling himself for the final goodbye, he feels a gentle, insistent tug on his arm. It’s in his muscle memory by now to let Lalli guide him where he wants him. It has taken him a long time to realise Lalli usually has a good reason for doing the things he does.

Lalli stops in a secluded alley between two buildings. Sigrun’s laugh is getting louder- she’s just reached the climax of what is going to be her last story. Then it will be time to go. 

Emil wonders if he should say something.

There are plenty of things he could say to Lalli: It’s been a good winter; I can’t believe I won’t see you until the next winter; I don’t know if I’m going to be able to breathe without you next to me…

But these things are a tad over-familiar. If Lalli could actually understand what was being said to him, he would probably not appreciate it.

So Emil settles for something simple. He’s going to say that he will see Lalli next winter, though this is a fairly stupid and therefore redundant statement. Obviously, Lalli thinks so too, because he kisses Emil before Emil can get a syllable of the stupid words out.   
The world seems to turn upside down. Or explode. Or melt away. One of those things.

Whatever it has just done, it is not the same world it was before Lalli kissed him. Emil isn’t sure what has changed. Except that he can’t hear very much over the roar of his own pulse. And then Lalli hugs him and Emil wonders if Lalli knows something he doesn’t- say, maybe Emil is about to die?   
All the same, he hugs him back. He squeezes him back, just as Lalli squeezes him, and thinks that if he just hangs on hard enough then they won’t have to separate.

When they separate, Emil’s eyes are wet. Lalli dabs at Emi’s eyes with his own sleeve, and a wry smile Emil has only seen a few times before. He lets his hand rest on Emil’s jaw.  
What he says then, through that touch, is far better than anything either of them could have cobbled together to say to the other. It’s louder. It’s deeper. It’s going to be ringing in Emil’s ears for the rest of the year, assuming his pulse ever recovers sufficiently that his heart no longer the only thing he can hear properly. 

Tuuri calls for Lalli in the distance. Lalli’s hand to drops to Emil’s shoulder, then to his hands, which he squeezes again. He takes a step back. His hands stay in Emil’s until they are too far away to reach each other, and their hands slide apart at the finger-tips.   
Emil understands what he has said. What he has promised. He returns the promise with a smile that he hopes is not being ruined by the few tears that have now made their way down his face. 

When Lalli puts his back to Emil and walks out of sight, Emil crosses his arms over his chest. 

He is cold. It has nothing to do with the chill of the last few winter breezes that have just picked up at his back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some day.
> 
> *puts on shipper's glasses to re-read the whole comic*
> 
> Some. Day.


	42. 69: Annoyance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reynir cannot magic and annoys everyone with his escapades.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aged it up a little bit so everyone could speak to each other. Reynir's pleas for help need to be understood, after all.

In the three years Emil has known the mages, he has become accustomed and comfortable to the idea of magic existing, whether he likes it or not. He knows about luontos and fylgja. He has seen them in action- great, invisible forces tearing reality apart at the seams in battle, defying various scientific laws and allowing their human counterparts to do the same. He can deal with it. It’s not really his place to be in awe or offended by his friend and boyfriend’s abilities, is it?

But there are still some moments which catch him off-guard. 

He thinks on this on their third mission into the Silent World, when, on Sigrun’s orders, he ventures into the woods they are camped next to to retrieve the mages from their practice. At first, he sees on Lalli, whose head is craned up and whose hands are on his hips.

“…dumb, but this is a whole new kind of dumb.”

He seems to be fussing at a tree-branch. 

“Lalli!” calls Emil “Is everything alright?”  
Lalli tends to get a little bit delirious when he has a serious fever. Once, during their second year and second mission (and the first few weeks of what Emil can justifiably consider the beginning of their relationship), he was so sick after a strenuous battle that he called Mikkel ‘mom’ and Sigrun ‘dad’ and asked them how they got out of their graves, and put themselves back together, for that matter. 

Emil is worried his boyfriend may have strained himself yet again until he sees what appears to be a bathrobe dangling from the tree that has incurred Lalli’s quiet wrath.

Reynir. Reynir’s strong arms are wrapped around the thick branch and his legs hang upwards, as if a rope is around his ankles.

“What did you do?” asks Emil, exasperated.

“Reynir broke gravity.” says Lalli.

“I didn’t break gravity,” protests Reynir “I just- I just altered my personal gravity.”

He’s a good way up there. At least three stories.

“Well why would you want to do that?” asks Emil.

“I didn’t mean to! I was trying to spell myself into a bird’s form. You know, to scout? I must have phrased it wrong-”

“Very wrong.” confirms Lalli.

“I said something like ‘tie me not to the earth’ and then this happened and now I don’t know how to get down without…dying.”

Emil does what he always does in stressful and confusing situations, where life and death hang in the balance. He goes and gets Sigrun.

Sigrun takes in the sight of Reynir. His braid stands to attention along his spine, though his clothes hang to the earth and stir in the breeze, unaffected by whatever force is tugging him towards the sky. 

“Oh Reynir,” says Sigrun in a mixture of cheerfulness and an obvious desire to slaughter Reynir for the ludicrous difficulty he has gotten himself into “It’s like watching a squirrel try to find its winter stash. You and your magic.”

Reynir wants to take slight offense to that, but he wisely does not express this. At this rate Sigrun is his best hope for getting down without shooting up. Falling into the sky would be a very strange way to die, Emil thinks, if a poetic one. Where would he stop? Would the mountains of clouds be enough to stop him- though they are only made of water vapour- or would he keeping going until he reached space and, if the old stories about astronauts are true, exploded the moment he touched the vacuum?

Emil is somewhere between not wanting to know and urging Reynir’s fingers to slip so he has a chance to find out. 

Reynir, meanwhile, is getting flustered. His knuckles are white with the effort of hanging on, so he swings his legs down and crosses them around the branch, now clinging like an animal on a tree. He could be back to normal, except for his braid still standing straight.  
“Well? Are- are we just gonna stand around all day and watch me in my shame, or are we going to help each other out?” 

“I don’t know. This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen a mage do.” says Sigrun “I don’t know if I want it to end.”

“Sigrun.” says Lalli.

“Alright, alright,” she pats him on the shoulder in her least patronising manner “I’ll get the little idiot down if you think you can un-curse whatever curse he put on himself.”

“Wait, what if he can’t? Are you just going to leave me up here?”

Sigrun scoffs “Of course not! We’ll tie a rope around your waist! It’ll be like flying a human-sized kite.”

Reynir turns a desperate look on Lalli and mouths ‘help’.

Though she is closer to forty than not, Sigrun is still spry and strong. She shimmies up the tree without a problem and has reached Reynir within a few moments.

While she goes up, Emil and Lalli exchange a few quick and furtive words.

“Can you fix this?”

“Probably.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know. Reynir’s spells are strong. Amateurish, but strong.”

“Not stronger than yours?”

Lalli frowns at him “Of course they are. Do you have any idea how strong a mage has to be to manipulate their magic successfully before they’re trained? And not blow up their heads in the process?”

Emil shakes his head “Nope. I have no idea about that at all.”

“Well, it’s strong. Think of him as a tank.”

“What are you? A bicycle?”

“I’m sleeping on my own is what I am. You’re banished to the floor.” he replies sullenly.

Before Emil can argue his case, Sigrun lets out a woot of triumph “Got him!”

“Can you hang onto him?” Lalli calls up.

Sigrun answers by testing whether or not she is able to hold onto him. She has Reynir let go of the branch, cautiously and gingerly, and climb onto her back.

“Yep! It’s just like giving him a piggy-back, except gravity’s pulling the wrong way. Alright, Freckles, hold on- no, tighter. Look, buster, if you have to touch a little bit of boob to get down alive then just touch the boob. Gods. They’re not holy items, they’re just milk glands.”

It may be the weirdest thing Emil has ever seen; watching a seasoned warrior descale a tree, with a mage clutching her back and chest (and, despite his efforts not to, touching a little bit of boob), his knees locked around her lower-back, and his hair standing up like a long candle flame wavering in a wind.  
Emil tries not to laugh. He fails and laughs so hard Lalli has to catch him to keep him from falling into the snow.

By the time Sigrun has reached the ground, Mikkel and Tuuri have finally been attracted over by the cacophony. Whether they are responding to Emil’s hysterical laughter or Reynir’s slightly more hysterical yelp, each time Sigrun slips a little and it seems he might go tumbling back up again, is not clear. But the moment Mikkel sees what is going on, his face assumes the look of perfect and calculated disappointment.

“Why is Reynir being pulled to space?” he sounds like a father asking one of his children why the barn burnt down.

Tuuri isn’t sure whether she should be flustered with concern for her boyfriend or with laughter for his predicament. She may not mean to, but she selects the second and is presently also sagging against Lalli, trying to stop herself from face-planting into the snow.

“I didn’t mean to do this to myself.” says Reynir weakly “It just kind of happened.”

Tuuri is weeping. She tries to speak, but cannot, and goes off into fresh gales of laughter.  
She and Emil only make each other laugh harder, until finally Sigrun is in on it even as she clutches Reynir, acting as his one and only tether to life.

Lalli and Mikkel stand in the middle of this chaos. Their eyes meet.

“Can you fix this?” asks Mikkel.

Lalli wraps an arm around Emil’s shoulders to support him “His magic is strong, but his spells are still simple. I should be able to get inside the spell and break it up.” 

“Will it be difficult?”

Lalli shakes his head “It’s just a minor annoyance.”


	43. 32: Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli can't sleep. Everyone else can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got a fic-dump coming soon. There should be about five or six posted at once to make up for the time I have had to spend on work recently. 
> 
> This fic is just a bit of goofy fun.

Lalli generally doesn’t have a problem sleeping in strange places.

As a scout, one has to expect to spend the odd night in a tree while a determined troll prowls underneath. He has slept everywhere from an old dry storm drain to the topmost boughs of a pine tree to, on one especially memorable occasion, snuggled up inside a fox’s den with the mother and her babies.

But for some reason the floor of the Tank is presenting him with a problem; he can’t sleep. Tonight, for whatever reason, he just can’t do it.  
He shuts his eyes and all he thinks of is how badly he wants to sleep and how far away from sleep he is. Changing his position does little to nothing for this problem. If he turns to face the wall, he feels cut off from the rest of the group. From their warmth and the primal comfort of having a bunch of others of his own species around him. If he turns to face them he ends up with a liberal mouthful of Reynir’s stupid, stupid hair.

It’s bad enough that Reynir’s hair gets everywhere and anywhere- places human hair should not be and conceivably, scientifically, should not be able to reach without some kind of assistance- but Reynir has also found some way to sprawl across literally the whole floor. No matter what position Lalli is in, some sharp part of Reynir pokes him.  
Right now, on his back, staring at the bottom of Emil’s bunk, he has an elbow buried in his side. Feels more like a knife. The more he shifts away from it, somehow, the deeper the elbow burrows. Reynir seems to be glued to him.

Lalli has tried to shove him away once or twice, but the last time he tried it, Reynir started to roll towards him. He panicked a little bit and beat him back with his pillow. Once the elbow started to poke him again, Lalli decided it wasn’t worth his life to get it back out.  
So now he suffers in silence.

Well, as much silence as can be had with Tuuri’s thunderous snoring. He is surprised no one else is losing sleep over the cacophony overhead. It sounds like a dragon clearing its throat. It sounds like a hurricane running through a forest. It sounds like a tractor’s engine exploding. Normally, Lalli finds these noises comforting.  
He grew up with this lullaby singing him to sleep. He understands Tuuri’s uniquely raspy and horrific snores to be a noise equivalent to warmth and safety and a good night’s rest.

But sleeplessness in the Silent World is an entirely different matter. Now, it sounds like the kind of low rumble a troll might make as a mating call, if they had the need or capacity to procreate. Lalli is genuinely afraid his cousin’s snores might prove a siren song and draw the trolls down on their heads.  
What will they do then? Throw Reynir out the door. Distract them with a snack while Tuuri gets them the Hel out of the way. And what, with all this hair, the hairballs the trolls are likely to get from eating Reynir may kill a few of them. Two birds with one stone.

Lalli has been entertaining himself with fantasies of watching Reynir’s red braid being sucked down the maw of a giant troll for close to half an hour when Sigrun’s night terrors start.  
As far as he can tell, the noises Sigrun makes in her sleep are not actually terrified. So it’s more like Sigrun terrorising the night. Screeching at her nightmares, undoubtedly raising her fists or dagger or sword in her dreams, or charging the Rash-sick castle to rescue the princess. Like all mages, Lalli gets vague flashes of the dreams of the people around them as they occur.

He catches the tail-end of Sigrun’s favourite dream, the aforementioned princess dream, as she snags the damsel from her tower, who swoons and weeps her thanks. He watches Sigrun spirit her away behind their front-lines while the battle rages on. She puts the princess on her feet only to have the maiden swoon back into her arms.

The dialogue of Sigrun’s dreams are clear to him; no one speaks a foreign language when it comes to dreams.

The princess raises wet and sparkling eyes to Sigrun’s “You saved me. I am yours to do with as you wish.”

Sigrun drops her immediately “Oh for the love of the gods. Lady, first I gotta bust cheek getting you outta that stupid tower because you never learned how to swing a dagger in the first place and now you offer me the- the freaking services of the flesh? Gross! Can you get any dumber? Gods! Go learn something useful, will you? Go apprentice yourself to a smithy or something.”

Then Sigrun hurls herself back into the arms of her one and true love- the battle.

“You have problems.” whispers Lalli aloud.  
Sigrun has so many problems.

Lalli has no interest in anyone else’s dreams at the moment. Alright; perhaps a fleeting interest in Emil’s, but that would be intruding. He looked once and it was all smoke and burning wood and slanted shadows that freaked him out so badly he didn’t stay for more than a few moments. Mikkel’s dreams are all blood and death. The aftermath of Kastrup repeats in his head every night.  
Tuuri’s dreams he almost knows by heart from listening to them since he was tiny, and Reynir’s? 

Well Reynir is probably waiting at the borders of Lalli’s own haven. Like a lost puppy. Wanting to trade magic secrets and braid hair and make flower crowns and that stupid stuff. Honestly, who makes flower-crowns? Who the Hel discovers at twenty years old that they have an avatar within an unexplored spiritual plane and choses to use their time there making flower-crowns?

Lalli turns briefly to Reynir. It is worth the mouthful of hair to say this to his sleeping face: “You’re weird. Weirder than me.”

Reynir stirs in his sleep and flips over, slapping Lalli in the face with his braid.

“I’m sneezing on something you own tomorrow,” vows Lalli, his voice soft and bitter “I don’t know what yet, but I’m going to sneeze on it and you’re going to touch it and you’re never going to know you touched sneeze.”

Sigrun shouts indistinct in her sleep. Mikkel jumps awake in shock and glares at Sigrun. When she does not stop screaming, he slips the pillowcase from his pillow and rises, stepping gingerly around the sprawled Reynir, and balls up the pillowcase. Lalli watches with mild interest as he gently lifts Sigrun’s head and ties the pillowcase in a gag around her mouth.  
The cries are muffled, but not silenced.

Mikkel says something that Lalli doesn’t understand. If Lalli could speak Danish, he would hear: “Bloody babbling bastard. Extra wax for her tomorrow.”

Mikkel gets back into his bunk, but senses there are eyes on him. He glances under Emil’s bunk. Two keen and tired eyes glare back at him.

Mikkel waves. Lalli waves back. Mikkel puts his head under his pillow and falls back asleep within ten seconds. Lalli hates him for this.

He spends the rest of the night trying to sleep and failing miserably.

 

The next morning, Tuuri gives him a strange look as he emerges from the Tank into the cold morning.

“You’ve got bags under your eyes as big as Sigrun’s nose. What’s wrong with you? Didn’t sleep at all?”

“No,” says Lalli through gritted teeth “I didn’t.”

Then he face-plants into the snow, asleep before he hits the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ideally, I would have made this fic shippy as all get out. Ideally. Instead we have something with no character development, random headcanons fired in every direction and a very, very sleep-deprived mage.


	44. 72: Mischief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mikkel is bored. Luckily, some of his team-mates can be very, very entertaining if manipulated in the right way.

Mikkel has passed many lazy Tuesday afternoons, but few have ever been so torturously lazy and slow. The cold air has become syrupy. The light has gone all grey and dusty. The tasks of the day are completely completed. Everything from transcription to cat-grooming to Reynir grooming to the laundry to mopping up the little bloodstains Sigrun is apt to drip in her wake.  
Sigrun and Emil are gone to gallivant around the Silent World, to bring him back scrapes to apply salve to and cuts to bandage or stitch should the depth call for it. They have taken with them his main source of diversion, when he is not secret-agenting around, collecting his notes for his reports and such, or dodging Reynir’s spirited attempts to help with the chores. 

Mikkel is so bored he has almost transcended consciousness in his boredom. The astral plane seems close at hand. One of his younger brothers once admitted to having some kind of adventure in the mages’ realm after consuming some suspicious mushrooms, and this is the state of being Mikkel feels his boredom is drawing him to; the salt of a lake, a blanket of stars, and a lynx circling his feet curiously.  
He has also lost all the feeling in his left leg. He should probably get up and shake that thing out before the winter tries to sneak a hypothermic tooth in. Winter gets up to all sorts of mischief when one is so indolent one can barely be bothered to pay attention to one’s blood-flow.

His heart might stop beating at any moment and Mikkel, in his dreary state of mind, would be no the wiser until his soul quit his body. 

For lack of anything better to do, Mikkel is watching the kitten attempting to walk in the snow. Few things are cuter than baby animals discovering their own limbs for the first time. The kitten’s fur is fluffed thick against the cold, and each step is tentative and irritable, as if she is offended by having to condescend to walk on the snow. She is young yet, but that inherent, haughty ‘cattitude’, as his mother used to put it, is coming in steadily. 

“That’s right, kitty,” mumbles Mikkel in the tongue he tends to revert to in occasions of extreme mental laziness- Greenlandic, his father’s second language “Go on. Enjoy the snow. Soon you’ll be an adult with responsibilities. Boring responsibilities.”

Tuuri, reading on the doorstep of the Tank, gives him a quizzical look “What did you say?”

“I said something in Greenlandic.”

“’Something’ is a very long word in that language, isn’t it?”

“What? No. I mean I said a few words in Greenlandic. You know. Something. I’m being aloof about it.”

“Oh,” Tuuri turns back to her book “I didn’t know you could speak Greenlandic.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Mikkel is tempted to tell her he is, as a part of his top-secret job, required to be fluent in several other languages. He has understood every word of Finnish that has passed between her and her cousin. Not that there has been much to it.  
Tuuri tries to get Lalli to do what she wants, when she wants it. Lalli annoys her by ignoring her with practiced ease. And, from the furtive and somewhat lopsided gossip sessions (Lalli doesn’t quite understand or appreciate the concept of exchanging secret opinions about his colleagues) which they occasionally hold within earshot of the others, Tuuri thinks Reynir is super-cute and Lalli thinks Emil kind of strange. 

Mikkel has so far repressed his urge to take Lalli to the side and explain in no uncertain terms: no, Emil is not ‘strange’, Emil is awkward and crushing very hard on you and please try to accommodate him because I think you like him too and this stupid romance stuff in close-quarters drives me crazy and if the air of awkward and tender tension gets any thicker I will suffocate and die.

Or something to that effect.

Sighing, Mikkel tilts his head up to the sky, surveying the clouds for any interesting activity. No birds. No funny shapes. No looming storm-clouds in the distance.

Mikkel thinks about making a few snow-angels. He discards the idea. Reynir and Tuuri and Lalli are here. Granted, one is asleep, the other is reading and the final is trying to make his magic work by talking gently to a nearby tree in an effort to coax it into moving for him (several times he has had his hopes raised by a sharp wind), but Mikkel still feels the report would make its way back to Sigrun somehow.   
Gods know she would never let him live that down.

He has just begun to think he’s resigned to an afternoon wasted in boredom when something occurs to him.  
Back when he was a child on the family farm, he and his twin had to invent their own games to keep them from slipping into the insanity that their odd, idle hours created. So rare were these idle hours that they nearly never happened, but when they did, the Madsen twins were prepared.

Fortunately for their purposes, the farm’s barn served as a kind of winter lodge for the strays and a few of the domestics of Bornholm. Nearly every sort of cat, in terms of creed and colour and weight and apparent life-style, would turn up there to lounge in the hay and chat with the cows, to groom each other, to enjoy a few nights of disastrously loud fun that would send some of the females home pregnant.  
Mikkela, his sister and senior by four minutes, discovered a wonderful game one day when a metal button on her jacket caught the sun. 

A circle of tinny light danced across the shadows on the floor. Five cats immediately fell on it. They slapped paws over the spot and, upon lifting the paws and finding their catch gone, grew all the more frantic to recapture the prize when they spotted it again. Mikkela and Mikkel took turns using the button to catch the sun and using the caught sun to steer cats this way and that. Eventually they had half of the population of the barn after their sunspot with bloodlust in their eyes. The rest of the barn watched with rapt interest.  
Since then, Mikkel has availed himself several times of the knowledge that cats can be hypnotized by moving lights, especially if they move quickly and tantalizingly just out of reach.

He gets out his dagger and beings to polish the blade with a rag. He catches some sun and aims it, delicately, in front of the kitten’s front paws.  
She stops immediately. Mikkel flicks the light this way and that. Her eyes follow. She pounces, but Mikkel is too fast for her. The prey whizzes out of reach. The kitten sets off in stumbling pursuit. He takes care not to lead her near any drifts or areas that might be too deep for her little legs to cope with.

“Mikkel! Look at the cat!” chirps Tuuri in delight “What’s she after?”

Mikkel shrugs innocently “I wouldn’t know. Cats are strange creatures.”

Reynir perks up and looks on with interest as the kitty executes a fantastic pounce, and again, fails to catch her tormentor.  
Mikkel tilts the dagger towards the tank and slips the fleck of light onto the vehicle’s flank. Unexpectedly, a pale hand shoots out of the doorway and slaps over where the light is, which Mikkel manages to flick away with milliseconds to spare.  
A very tired, very harassed-looking Lalli emerges from the tank in his sleeping clothes.

“Tuuri! That shiny bastard is back again!”

“Oh gods.” Tuuri stands and hops out of his way “Not this again.”

Lalli whirls around, scanning the snow and the tank’s sides “I just saw it. I know it’s here.”

If what Mikkel thinks is happening has just happened, then the afternoon has just changed from extraordinarily boring to one with immense potential. 

He guides the light carefully to rest on top of Lalli’s hand.

When Lalli sees it, a glint enters his eyes which Mikkel has only seen a few times; in his sister’s eyes every time she saw chocolate, in the farm’s dogs’ eyes every time they had a rabbit to chase, and once, a long time ago, in his own, the first time he caught a glimpse of himself in a shattered window at the sight of Kastrup.  
In the instant he lays eyes on what Mikkel belatedly realizes is a mortal enemy, Lalli is terrifying. Mikkel sees his lips form the word ‘mine’ silently before they draw back in a snarl. 

Lalli pounces. Mikkel flees.

“DEATH.”   
It is not so much a roar as a command. Mikkel has never seen Lalli this angry- he didn’t know the boy had much of a temper in him, but what temper he does have is coming out full force right now.

Reynir watches Lalli scrabbling furiously at the side of the tank with something like fear or awe.

He speaks from the corner of his mouth “Is this a Finnish ritual?”

Tuuri shakes her head “Nope. Lalli’s convinced he’s being stalked by some kind of evil fairy. Every now and then he absolutely freaks out and starts jumping all over the walls and furniture and stuff. It’ll pass in a minute.”

Mikkel cannot say he is surprised that Tuuri has failed to realize the cause of her cousin’s distress. Tuuri does not seem to notice much beyond books and horses and machines.  
All the better for him; he can continue his fun without being caught.

“Tuuri, he says, feigning innocence as he aims the fleck of light at the windscreen and sends Lalli leaping onto the hood of the tank in a fit of rage “What’s this all about? Is this some kind of fit?”

Tuuri explains the fairy to him, abashed on behalf of her family “He’s…he’s strange, you know? I mean, he’s just got this way of looking at the world that we don’t quite understand. Sometimes that way of looking at the world…it sends him a bit haywire.”

“Haywire.” repeats Mikkel thoughtfully.

“Why’s the kitty going haywire too?” 

Reynir points at the cat, who is now prowling the tank’s hood along with Lalli. They seem to be sharing a brief and uneasy truce in their quest to find the infernal light speck.

Tuuri is stumped for a moment “I don’t know. Maybe weird is infectious?”

Lalli’s head snaps in Tuuri’s direction “I’m going to kill it.”

Tuuri flashes him a thumbs-up and an encouraging smile “Go for it.”

“What did you say?” asks Reynir.

“I told him to go for it.”

“Oh. Is that a good idea?”

“Well I can’t fix his crazy. I see no reason not to indulge it.”

“Hear hear.” says Mikkel.

He lets the fleck of light stray again into Lalli’s field of vision. This time, Lalli lunges across the roof of the tank. He very nearly has the light trapped, from his perspective, when Mikkel flicks it away. The cat is not long after him.

“Dammit!” he spits when he sees it has evaded him once more.

Mikkel thinks that is enough for one day.

He puts the dagger up and watches calmly as Lalli and the kitten scour every inch of the roof, hood and flanks of the tank, in case their prey is hiding from them.

Mikkel’s fears of suffering through an endless string of dull afternoons are gone; now, when the air goes like syrup and the light like a swamp, Mikkel has something to take his mind off the agony of idle time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thought process on this one
> 
> Cats like to chase lights  
> Hotakainens= cats/owls  
> therefore, Lalli likes to chase lights  
> But he would probably think the light wanted to hurt him
> 
> Hence, this prompt was swiftly filled.


	45. 63: Do not disturb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When life gets tough, the tough isolate themselves in their garage and turn their problems into hand-made furniture. Sigrun does, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry posting's been so erratic recently. Had a tough week over here, culminating in a friend's life support being switched off in a few days. There are some obvious complications to my schedule, stemming from that, but I'll do my best to get back to posting regularly. I'm gonna go ahead and post three right now.

One of the twins calls him at midnight. He doesn’t know which; puberty is a few more months off at least, and they sound exactly like each other.

Mikkel gropes at the nightstand until he snags his phone “Hello?”

He realises he has put the alarm clock to his ear and tries again.

“Sigrun?” he says quizzically. This wouldn’t be the first time her caller ID has turned up on his phone at some unholy hour. He’s looking forward to hearing what her reason for disturbing his peace is this time.

“No, it’s me!” says a squeaky voice that is indistinguishable as Mads or Brynhildr.

Mikkel blinks “Oh. Why- why are you calling at midnight?”

“Mom’s in the garage again.”

“Ah. I see. And what is she making this time?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t go in. I got woke up by the sound of sawing and hammering, and the lights are all on. I’m kinda scared to go in and look, Uncle Mikkel. Can you come and see what’s wrong with her?”

“Sure. I’m on my way. Why don’t you go back to bed? I’ll have it resolved soon. No need to trouble yourself with,” he searches for the appropriate phrase to describe Sigrun’s apparent state of mind at the moment. Somehow, ‘your mother’s freakish attempts to solve her emotional problems by building pine furniture in the small hours of the morning’ does not seem a comforting response “…with this. Go on, back to bed…whichever one you are.”

“I’m Mads.”

“Ah, yes, well, back to bed Mads. I’ll let myself in.”

“Ok. Thanksbye.”

So it really was Mads. They are known to pretend to be each other on the odd occasion, given their wild success rates and the hysterical shenanigans usually generated by the tomfoolery.  
However there is one verbal tic which distinguishes them. Brynhildr keeps her ‘thanks’ and ‘goodbye’ separated whereas her brother has never been able to un-smash the words from the cute little train-wreck of words he used as a child.

He dresses quickly and quietly. Downstairs, he can hear his wife swearing at the manuscripts she is marking. Her university has just finished an exam block. She is not pleased with her students.  
He pops his head around the door of the baby’s room to make sure she is still asleep. Then, the boys, to make sure they are not reading in a flash-light tent again; no, they are sleeping like the dead.

When he gets downstairs, Sakura’s forehead is to a thick essay, her pen gripped in whitened knuckles.

“Sakura? Are you alright?”

She lifts her head to him and shows him her eyes are livid and bloodshot. Her mouth is pulled into a semi-crazy grimace, reminding him faintly of Heath Ledger’s turn at the Joker.

“I’m going to fail this student. I mean it. I don’t care how rich and influential his family is. He obviously doesn’t read his material and he doesn’t even spell-check.”

Though he is painfully conscious each second he stalls is another second Sigrun spends feeding her carpentry demons, like the good husband he is, he sits in the kitchen with Sakura for a moment to listen to her rant about the trials of a professor’s life.

When she is finished, she finally thinks to ask “What’re you doing up? It’s past midnight.”

“Sigrun’s doing that thing again.”

Sakura nods sympathetically “Oh, poor woman. Then again I guess we’re getting a new coffee table.”

The drive takes fifteen minutes. Normally it is a half-hour drive, but the roads are empty and the traffic lights change quickly. When he turns onto her quaint little neighbourhood’s street, he sees that her house, backed up against the woods that border their town, is full of life and activity. Light spills from Sigrun’s garage at the end of the street. In that light are two familiar figures.

Emil waves as Mikkel pulls into the drive.

“Good morning.” he yawns “She’s doing the thing again.”

“I know,” Mikkel shuts his door “Mads called me.”

They have to talk loudly to hear each other over the cacophony of hammering, sawing, wood squeaking and stomping footsteps seeping under the garage door.

“What’s wrong with her this time?” asks Lalli, who really does not have the patience to be standing in Sigrun’s driveway in his pyjamas and slippers this early on a Saturday morning.

 

The noise must have woken them up. When they started cohabitating (nearly five years ago now), Emil and Lalli ended up, by a convenient twist of fate, in the house across the street from Sigrun. They are now married and totally used to the weird activity that gets them up in the middle of the night, with whines of wood being cut or the sputter of a welding torch at the most ungodly hours one could imagine.  
They are what is known as the ‘emergency Sigrun skeleton crew’, meaning they generally help her handle the small crises that crop up daily. This can be anything from Emil dropping the twins off at school on his way to work, to Lalli calling poison control when Brynhildr eats the mushrooms that grow in the woods which she has repeatedly been told not to touch, to both of them pulling together to help Sigrun chase a bat out of the house that flew in through the chimney.

Sigrun calls them her ‘Gay house-elves’ to distinguish them from the non-gay house-elves, which is her affectionate nickname for her children. Well, so far there is no indication that either one of them is straight or gay or anything, so it’s hard to tell whether or not Emil and Lalli will have to graduate all the way up to ‘Married gay house-elves’ in the future.

Unfortunately for all involved, Emil and Lalli are not really trained to bring Sigrun down out of one of her fits of weirdness. Emil is almost as close to Sigrun as Mikkel is. But he has yet to crack what Mikkel thinks of as the ‘Eide Code’. Mikkel is pretty sure he is the only person in the world to have cracked that code.  
So when Sigrun goes into one of her ‘do not disturb’ modes, Mikkel is the only one who feels secure enough to go ahead and disturb her anyway.

“Why don’t you two head inside and check on the twins?”

“Alright.” says Emil “We’ll keep them distracted while you…you…”

“Sedate her.” suggests Lalli.

“Lalli!”

“What? It’s quicker. It’s humane too.”

“Drugging people is not humane.”

“You do realise she has a saw in there. And a lot of hammers and nails.”

“She wouldn’t hurt us.”

“And a welding torch.”

Mikkel shoos them off to the house before they can get any deeper into debate. Once the door is shut smartly behind them and the twins’ voices can be heard in the hall, demanding explanation and nerves-soothing hot chocolate, Mikkel knocks smartly on the garage door. He does not expect Sigrun will hear him over the noise.  
The sounds of construction stop. The garage door rolls up, revealing Sigrun in her house-robe, slippers and a pair of scratched safety glasses. Her hair is tied back, her front, covered in splinters. There’s a claw hammer in her hand.

“What?” she says, not unpleasantly.

“It’s 12:30 in the morning.”

“And?”

“And you have to take the kids to football practice tomorrow. Why aren’t you in bed?”

Sigrun twirls the claw hammer around in a circle in the way one might spin one’s car keys “I have little to no interest in sleeping right now.”

“Care to tell me why? I could guess if you like.”

“I like. Guess away, my good man.”

Mikkel does not have to think very hard on the reasons Sigrun might need a break from reality. 

“Are your parents ill?”

“Fit as fiddles.”

“Are you ill?”

“Nope. Hale as a horse.”

“Which kind of horse?”

“The noble kind. The healthy kind. Maybe I’m a Shetland pony- but the buffest, most healthy Shetland pony ever.”

“The trials of a single mother?”

“Oh, they are many and trialsome, but I’ve got my gay-house-elves to help me with that. Freckles and Stubby too. And you.”

Freckles and Stubby; Reynir and Tuuri. Tuuri is Lalli’s cousin, so close that she may as well be a sister, considering that they were also raised together. Reynir is another part of the circle. He just kind of turned up, like a stowaway hitching the wrong ship to the wrong destination, and never had the sense to get out of the group before he made life-long friends and fell in love with Tuuri.  
Mikkel faintly wonders if anyone has thought to call over Reynir and Tuuri. Tuuri is pretty much too pregnant to move at the moment, but Reynir could be useful to at least bring a sunny, cheerful disposition into this moment of sublime craziness.

Too late.

“Then I’m at a loss.”

“Do you concede defeat?”

“I concede defeat.”

“Is she normal again?” calls a squeaky voice through the letterbox.

Then, faintly, behind them: “Brynhildr, Stop bothering them. Get your fool lips out of that letterbox before the flap chops them off.”

Sigrun’s face is a little more tired when Mikkel looks back to her.  
“I’m scaring the kids, aren’t I?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. But you’ve impressed me.” he gestures to the mess of wood-shavings behind the Jeep “Half a bookshelf made in so little time.”

“That’s a writing desk.”

“It’s…it’s a very short one, don’t you think?”

“I haven’t put the damned legs on yet. Did you come over here without your glasses?”

“I’m afraid so. The twins seemed worried you were doing something against your health in here,” he does not tell her which one was afraid enough to call, because he has already forgotten which one he talked to “So do you mind if I ask what has set off this particular bout of…of frantic creativity?”

Sigrun steps aside and gestures for him to come in with her claw hammer. She realises she may take his head off if she keeps waving it around, so places the hammer carefully on top of a workbench and starts dusting the wood-shavings off her front.

“It’s that stupid corporate holiday.”

“Which one?”

“Father’s Day. I hate it so much.”

It would figure Sigrun hates the day designed to celebrate the very figure her children are lacking. Well, biologically, anyway. There is no shortage of male role models for them. But Sigrun still deals with an annual and over-whelming feeling of inadequacy and guilt.  
The guilt because she believes herself responsible, somehow, for failing to provide her kids with a father figure. Mainly because she is neither interested in romance or marriage or anything that might coax some brave and enterprising male into the Eide household. The inadequacy is always there- most parents are horribly self-conscious and insecure about their parenting. Mikkel, for example, worries so often that he is going to ruin his third child and only daughter by merely speaking to her, with his sharp cynicism and deadpan humour that he has taken to staying quiet around her. In the end, this will probably produce worse results than what he might get from babbling at her like an average father. 

“What’s to hate?” Mikkel casts an admiring glance at Sigrun’s project, which he is still fairly certain is a half-made bookshelf “The twins will make you a card proclaiming you to be their ‘Lady Dad’ and give you some chocolate like every year. You’ll be quite spoiled.”

For his part, Mikkel knows he’s going to get some demented crayon scribbles from his boys and probably a well-meaning vomit on his shirt from his little girl. 

Sigrun leans on the trunk of the Jeep. Her face is closed and tired “Spoiled is a word for it. I don’t know. It’s just stupid. I get surrounded by all this…propaganda about what a father is for. Football and DIY and camping. It just makes me feel fake ‘cos I’m the one that does that with the house-elves. Fake and pulled in too many directions.”

“Lonely.” surmises Mikkel.

She nods, defeated “Lonely in my castle. And I hate thinking about him. Their father. I hate thinking about where he might be right now, with a different family, a wife, a husband, different kids. He doesn’t even know about the twins.”

“His loss.”

She gives him a reluctant smirk “My gain?”

“Our gain. I doubt we, the rest of us I mean, would have the chance to be as involved in the twins’ lives if there was some biological father figure plodding around here.”

“That’s true.” she will allow him at least that much “I should probably go back to bed, huh?”

Mikkel nods “The bookshelf can wait.”

“That’s a desk.”

“I don’t know what kind of desks you’ve been seeing, Sig, but that is no desk. That’s a bookshelf.”

“We can argue the finer points of the difference between desks and bookshelves in the morning.”

She steps smartly over the pile of wood-shavings and stray planks of wood and shoos Mikkel out of the garage. She flicks the light off, closes the door, locks it, and heads into the house without another word.

Mikkel is satisfied that she will be just fine.


	46. 92: All that I have

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: crappy parents and angst ahead

It is not a hard choice to make, between leaving Saimaa and staying in Saimaa. Or, to be more precise, between leaving their little village, Mikkeli, and letting Tuuri grow up in the shadows of the ruin that loom around them, and knowing that her parents died on the soil she will have to tread daily between home and school.  
In the back of his mind, Onni had somehow always known or assumed he was making plans around the idea that Lalli was coming with them as well. He would have never let himself consider leaving Mikkeli or Saimaa if some part of him had not been absolutely certain he would be taking his little cousin with him too. 

He still fails to address the issue of bringing Lalli with them until his aunt asks.

One day, only a few weeks after the accident, so the cleaners are still scrubbing blood from the packed earth and repairing the damage to the doctor’s office, she pulls him to the side.  
Her face has gone as grey as her prematurely aged hair. The bags under her eyes are so deep they seem to extend the length of her nose “Why does Lalli think he’s leaving Saimaa?”

For the first time, it occurs to Onni that he has never told Lalli he is not leaving Saimaa. Lalli assumed just the same as he did.  
“He is.”

“He isn’t. You and Tuuri are.”

“He wants to come with us.”

His aunt’s face creases with pain and exasperation; a mirror of the expression she tends to wear whenever she sees her son approaching “Lalli is too young to know what he wants. Besides, he’s sick.”

“He isn’t sick.”

“Then what would you call it?” she snaps “He’s sick, and at least here people know that he’s sick. They know not to bother him.”

Due in no small part to Lalli’s own involvement. His ‘sickness’, as his mother refers to it, is partially a desire to avoid nearly all human contact. He hates to be touched and he hates to be around people. It’s almost painful for him to talk to anyone but Onni and Tuuri, who seem to be the only people in the world he was ever comfortable around.  
Onni sometimes wonders if he has been more of a father to Lalli than the man they buried (what was left of him anyway) a few weeks earlier, and more of a mother than this greying, tired woman trying to tell him she knows what is best for her son.

“You don’t think he’ll spend the rest of his life in Saimaa, do you?” he tries to keep his voice low and reasonable. If he doesn’t, he will end up screaming at her.

“Of course not. He’s only eight, though, and that’s still too young to…to do anything.”

“Lalli isn’t a child. You and I both know he hasn’t been a child for a long time.”

The creases in his aunt’s face grows deeper “He’s a sick child. I told you, he’s just sick. He doesn’t know how to be a child.”

Another point in her diagnosis that Onni takes issue with: the idea that Lalli does not know what he is doing.  
He is aware what will happen to him if he shuns human contact. He’ll seem strange and sick to the rest of his society, and they in turn will also shun him. What his mother fails to understand is that Lalli wants this. He wants to be alone in his world, apart from the few, special people he will let through to him. His mother is not one of those people, though she might have been, had she chosen to treat him better when his ‘illness’ became apparent.

“Why don’t you talk to him about it?” says Onni “Just listen to what he has to say. He’ll talk, if you ask him.”

She shakes her head “That’s not an appropriate thing to discuss with him. I’m not going to raise his hopes unfairly.”

“Aunt, he’s already made his choice. The best you can do now is try to accept that.”

He turns and leaves, ignoring all of her attempts to call him back.

 

At night, Lalli lets himself in the back door a few minutes before Tuuri goes to bed, and climbs into Onni’s bunk. He’s done this almost every night since the accident. It is his small way of both taking and giving comfort.  
When Tuuri sees he is there she has them both scoot over and gets in on the end. The blankets are stretched taut, struggling to accommodate a fully-grown teenager and two growing children. Onni’s feet are uncovered but he does not complain. Nor does he point out that they have thieved his pillow so he has only the most extreme corner of the pillowcase. 

After ten minutes of staring at the ceiling in silence, Tuuri says “What am I going to do when we go to Keuruu?”

“You’re going back to school. Lalli too. There aren’t that many mages in Keuruu, but I’ll see what I can do about getting you into training, Lal.”

He grunts.

“What about you?” asks Tuuri, tugging at the edge of the top blanket in an effort to cover more of herself. This results in an ever more vigorous tug from the opposite end as both Onni and Lalli reclaim what she stole. 

“I’ll work.”

“Like Mom and Dad?”

“Like Mom and Dad.”

“What about cooking? Who’s gonna cook?”

“I guess I will.”

Unexpectedly, Lalli joins in “We can’t make him do everything. We have to help with some stuff.”

Onni frowns. The fit is so tight that he cannot turn to Lalli to show his displeasure “I’m not sure I want you guys handling boiling water.”

They both scoff in perfect unison. It makes Onni smile.

“We aren’t helpless!” says Tuuri “We do more dangerous stuff all the time.”

“Going out on the lake.” suggests Lalli.

“Self-defence classes.”

“Making fires.”

“And a lot more,” finishes Tuuri, because she cannot think of anything else on par with the level of danger that cooking entails.

Onni digests their protest in silence. He is aware he will have to learn to accept their complaints, criticisms and the odd tantrums, if he intends to become their sole guardian. Which he does. He wouldn’t trust anyone else with what is left of Tuuri’s childhood and whatever weird, stunted adulthood Lalli has going on.

“We’ll figure it out along the way.” he promises.

They sit in silence for a few moments more. So long and still are these moments that Onni dares to believe they may have actually fallen asleep. 

Then Lalli says “You two don’t even know how to sew. You can’t make your own clothes or anything. You’d have to be naked without me.”

 

As the date of their departure approaches, Onni does his best to avoid his aunt. She returns the favour for the most part. Lalli does not go to his own home anymore, once he has retrieved everything he has deemed fit to take with him, and eats with Tuuri and Onni. He does not speak to his mother either. She makes a few attempts to get him to talk to her.  
Mostly, this involves them bumping into each other in the streets like strangers, her bending, speaking softly and forcefully to him, and his wide grey eyes turned up to her in indifference. These encounters, most of which Onni has sneakily watched from the corner of a building or the shadow of an alley, will only last for a few minutes. Two at max. The extent of Lalli’s mother’s patience.

Then she will walk away with tears standing in her eyes and a few unspilt curses at her lips.

On the night before the departure, when Onni has stuck Tuuri and Lalli into his bed for an early night and is going through their luggage one more time to make sure they are all set, there is a knock on the front door. It grows more insistent as Onni searches for his keys. By the time he has opened the door, his aunt is about to pound it down.  
She tries to step through, but he blocks her. She is a small woman. He is already the size of a grown man. Filling the doorway with his girth is no struggle.

“I’m not going to do this inside. They’re asleep.” he says in a harsh whisper “We’re going to talk about this somewhere else.”

She complies, her lips pressed into a tight line, her face greying with anger and resentment.

Onni leads her around the back of the house and up to the small copse of trees that grows at the top of the slope, at the bottom of which the house was built. Tuuri and Lalli are forbidden from going into the woods without Onni; even this close to population centres which are generally considered Cleansed, there can be traces of the Rash lingering on somewhere.  
He does not, however, think to take his mask, nor fear falling sick tonight. He knows he will not fall sick by now. It will be the sickness that kills him, certainly, but the victims of the virus, not the virus itself.

She seems to have forgotten all that she wished to say once they reach the woods. She opens and shuts her mouth several times. Onni waits, tired and impatient.

“He’s all that I have.” manages his aunt after a while. 

“You don’t even like him.”

“But I love him.”

“So do I. I’m not gonna let him grow up with someone who doesn’t want him there.”

“I do!” she protests “I do! Of course I do! He’s my son.”

Onni shrugs “I don’t know if that’s enough. You don’t like him now, when he’s small and quiet. How are you going to feel about him as he gets older?”

She will not look him in the eye “The same.”

“Why do you want him here?” he demands, growing angry “If you don’t like him? If you hate seeing him? Even before- before the…the breach, he spent so many nights at our place you’d think he was a brother instead of a cousin. He basically belonged to my parents. You and Uncle just…just didn’t do that much for him. You don’t really have a claim on him.”

“He’s my son,” she repeats “He’s all that I have. Left. Left of his father.”

Onni considers this for a moment “Then you have nothing.”

He leaves her in the wood. He leaves Saimaa without laying eyes on her once more. Neither do Tuuri or Lalli and no one has any complaints about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone wondering the 'illness' Lalli's mother is so terrified by is a mild form of autism, which, in my headcanon of Lalli, he has. This isn't horrifying or embarrassing, but unfortunately, this being a post-apocalypse, people aren't necessarily educated enough to know that.


	47. 62: Magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In another world, Emil is the magical one, and quickly discovers it's not all sparkles and fun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just messing around with the idea that Swedish mages might somehow in some way exist.

It’s hard to keep a secret in a family like Emil’s. Being an only child is definitely a detriment; his parents constantly concern themselves with where their son has gone and where he plans to be and how this might affect their plans for him. 

Their plans for him are quite detailed. Illustrious and luxurious. They mainly centre around getting him matched off to a suitably rich and pretty girl at eighteen, marrying said girl at twenty, then embarking on some rich person’s career like goofing off with all his money.

Emil takes issue with several aspects of this plan. The idea of having to marry a girl is the most troubling to him. He doesn’t like girls. He never has and suspects he never will.   
Secondly, he doesn’t want to live the rest of his life languishing in the family wealth and posterity and hob-knobbing all over the place. Emil wants to do something useful with his life. He does not understand how his parents are able to enjoy so thoughtlessly a life that is put to risk by their inaction, every day, by the Rash pressing in on all sides.

They are rich and they have the fortune of being immune. But for many, it’s not the same. Emil wants to do what he can to ensure at least one of those consuming worries are removed. 

So for him, rather than being horrifying, the discovery that he could summon fire at will and also not at will was a good one. He discovered this unusual ability at fourteen, so, that would be almost two years ago now. It was during one of his frequent and violent summer-time bouts of hay fever. Emil was walking the dogs (two purebred German shepherds named Baldr and Hödr) in some fields behind the estate when he was overcome by the need to sneeze.   
He turned from his dogs and did so, and, unexpectedly, blew a giant jet of flame out of his mouth that scorched a scar about the length of a longboat in the grass.

The dogs were delighted. They circled him, barking, putting their paws on his legs, demanding a second show.  
Emil was horrified. He sat down and stayed there, still as a corpse, for close to an hour before he could make himself accept what he had just done. It took him another hour to decide that he should not tell his parents. Swedish mages were so rare they verged on the mythical; the last confirmed report of a Swedish mage was in Year 70, and since that person also happened to be a quarter Finnish, the reports generally assigned the credit to that quarter of Finnish blood. 

He knows for a fact that his parents are both too snobbish to consider pairing up and off with anyone outside the Swedish circle of wealth. He does not know about his ancestors; he could be anything from Greenlandic to Saami to Finnish to something even more unlikely and different, like Syrian or Samoan.   
But as far as he knows, his blood is mostly Swedish. And somehow that’s given him magical abilities? Weird. Very, very weird.

So Emil has spent the last two years in deep self-reflection and study. With the help of scattered reports and articles, all of them hypothetical or otherwise frustratingly vague, he has studied the nearly non-existent species of Swedish-blooded mages. 

Today, Emil wakes up early and whistles for the dogs. They come bounding to him from downstairs and clamour around his feet in excitement while he does his best to get dressed. It’s hard, because he has to make an effort not to face-plant over a pair of dog-legs or a frantically wagging tail while he struggles into his breeches.

“Walk?” he suggest.

The dogs agree enthusiastically and are waiting by the door before Emil has a chance to get down the stairs.  
The dogs are so far the only other people to know about his magical abilities, and they are sworn into solemn secrecy. They are the only ones Emil can discuss his worries with. As a result the walks have become a weekend’s tradition. 

He leaves the house without rousing his parents. It is only seven in the morning; they tend to start moving around ten or eleven, on good days. If they were up late toasting their wealth and general wonder and awesomeness, they will sleep until noon, failing to notice their son isn’t around until about two in the afternoon.  
Emil doesn’t mind. He made himself a lunch and has a full water-skin.

Once the house is at his back and the woods sprawl in front, Emil begins to relax.

“So I was in that weird dream place again last night,” he says, accepting the stick Hödr brings him, then throwing it as far as he can. Hödr is off after it like a bullet, but Baldr lingers to listen “I think I’ve pretty much finished exploring the place. I think it may be a burial mound? When I go inside the mound it’s furnished like a grave might be furnished. I don’t know- I’ve been looking through the history book I’ve got at the top of the tree and apparently that’s how old Saxon kings got buried. Do you think that means we’re secretly British instead of Swedish?”

Baldr snorts thoughtfully. His sister barrels back with the stick clamped in her strong jaws. Emil has to chase her around for a few moments to retrieve it and throw it afresh.

“Anyway, the burial mound has all of these artefacts from the old world. There are books in there in languages I didn’t even know existed. I can read them perfectly. There are swords and guns bigger than any kind we have around, there’s this shiny tray of little knives and tweezers- scalpels and stuff. It’s like somebody buried the old world inside my head. On the outside, it’s just a normal wood. I haven’t really had the courage to go outside yet, you know? Who knows what could be out there.”

He talks in much the same way, pausing to throw the stick every now and again, until they reach the wood and the tree Emil is after. Here, he peels off the jacket he doesn’t need and slings it over a branch. The jacket is just for appearances.

Should one of his few neighbours see the Västerström boy sneaking into the woods in only the pullover and think breeches he wears now as a light snow begins to fall, they would be extremely suspicious.   
His parents would be informed. His parents would question him. He would deny it, of course, but now his fire tends to come out when he is unnerved or afraid. He may well burst into flames in front of them. Then it would become self-explanatory; Emil no longer really feels the cold, nor is his body affected by it as one would expect. He could walk around waist-deep in the snow in just boxer-shorts if he felt the need to. He does not feel the need to do this.

“I’ll be back in a second,” he promises the dogs “Just be good and sit for a minute.”

They sit in unison, tails wagging.

Emil grasps a low-hanging branch and swings himself up onto the trunk with little trouble. One good thing about being a self-taught mage is that he ends up running from a lot of accidental explosions. Sometimes, he wonders he doesn’t bring the entire Swedish military down on the woods to investigate what the unholy Hel is going on behind the Västerström estate.   
At any rate, his training for the moment mostly consists of swinging up and down this one tree, at the top of which he hides his study materials, and which has given him hands as calloused as a black-smith’s and arms that are just about as muscular. The baby-fat puberty let cling on has been stripped off in most places. His stomach has gone flat and hard and still is strange to look at each morning in the mirror. 

The strangest thing is definitely watching his own veins pulsing and glowing with subtle red lights, like seams of coal that are already burning in the earth, or streams of lava spilling down volcano sides, like the kind they photograph in Iceland every now and then. He has taken to wearing long sleeves to cover up the most prominent veins in his wrists and upper arms. But out here, he feels no self-consciousness in rolling up the sleeves of his pullover and letting his blood do its freaky, lava (magma? Which one is still underground?) thing.

Emil’s study materials live in a water-proof tarp in the hollow about fifteen metres up the tree. The tree itself is at least double this height, but he prefers to settle down at the midpoint, where the wind is not so strong it will rip him from the branches while he digs out his work.  
Reaching in, Emil pulls out the tarp, then shakes the bag from it, which contains several books and articles, most of which were filched from the local archives (though it’s not like anyone will miss them; they hadn’t been touched for close to a decade before Emil got his grubby, glowing mitts on them), so no one will miss them.

He shakes a few leaves from the bag and heads back down, after cramming the tarp back into the hollow. So far, nothing has tried to make a nest in the hollow. Emil suspects this is because of his unusual magical smell smeared all over the place.

As soon as he hits the ground, he has a stick thrust into his leg. Emil tosses the stick for Hödr then flips open the bag and quickly checks all that was there last time is still there today. His materials are intact.

“Alright,” he says, stretching a cramp from shoulder-blades, from hanging off a branches for a little too long “Let’s go study, shall we?”

The dogs comply happily. Emil takes them to the usual spot and they quickly set about chasing noises in the low scrub and each other, play-fighting, occasionally mistaking their own tails for the other’s and nipping themselves in the process. While his dogs frolic Emil pulls out a few articles and re-reads the one about the alleged abilities of Swedish mages for about the fifteenth time that month.

Supposedly, all he is ever going to have access to is basic charm-casting, the same sort of protection spells that Finnish and Icelandic and Saami mages alike can all do, as well as his own, especially freaky brand of magic. Elemental magic, they call it, for lack of a better term. As far as Emil can tell this means that his ability to breathe fire is not as weird as he allows himself to believe.  
But still very weird and rare and something he should definitely hide.

“But should I?” he muses aloud “It’s a curse or it’s a gift. Either way I should be using it to help people, right? I mean, I guess before I started sneezing fire, I coulda been content with just sitting around and being rich. Well, except for the marriage part. I’d have to have an affair with a stable boy or something. But now? I don’t know. What do you guys think?”

Bladr pukes noisily behind a bush. Hödr runs over to lick it up.

“Thought as much.” says Emil.

 

In the end, he joins the Cleansers. It takes a few screaming fights and a lot of arguing his case for his parents to accept his decision. Well, not so much accept as tolerate. And to really drive the point home that he has no intentions of following their plans for his life, he has to come out as well.  
The ugly fight only gets uglier after that. On the bright side his dogs are very supportive. Hödr keeps hiding his father’s shoes and Baldr leaves several long and stinking presents inside Emil’s mother’s wardrobe three days in a row, until she finally caves to Emil’s arguments and gives her permission.

Once he actually has the ok to leave the only things he has ever known and loved, Emil starts to wonder about his choice.  
Is this really what he wants? Well, of course it is, but is this really what is good for him?

He supposes he will figure it out as he goes along.

 

About six months later, in his first serious battle, Emil distinguishes himself. Quite by accident.

The troll comes upon them suddenly when most of the other Cleansers are cleaning their weapons. They will be doing drills in an hour, all on straw dummies or captured specimens for a more realistic practice. Emil happens to be the only one whose flame-thrower is put together.  
So, it is natural that when the first three trolls barrel into the clearing, Emil leaps up and squeezes the trigger.

He performs beautifully. The danger and panic has hammered out, for the moment, every last flaw that months of training and harsh criticism from various mentors has not been able to do. He seems like a veteran. It is because of his quick thinking and reaction that the casualties are held down to a modest three.   
There were three dozen undefended men, women and others who were nowhere near prepared or sufficiently trained to respond to a surprise attack. The rate of injuries is high, of course, and includes Emil. He sustains a huge gash up his left arm that will put him out of commission for the next week at least. He got it when he stepped directly between a newbie (so new she had come in the previous week) called Ylva and a troll, and got a long wound for his trouble.

When the healers get Ylva onto a stretcher she is half-delirious with fear “He had no fuel.”

“Don’t try to talk,” says one of them with a yawn “You’re just shocked.”

“No, you don’t understand. There was no fuel tank. He had no fuel tank.” she coughs raggedly “He made the fire on his own. I saw. He just pretended to shoot, but really, it was coming out of his trigger finger.”

“Sure, kid, whatever you say.” says the other healer, before whispering loudly to their partner “This one’s gone crazy. Better sedate her.”

Emil watches Ylva go by on her stretcher. She does not see him, so focused is she in her effort to relate the tale, she fails to notice him getting his arm patched up not so far away. He glances at his flame-thrower.  
She was right; he will have to be more careful next time.


	48. 65: Horror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli has accepted that his partner is just a bit paranoid, in a very weird way, but Emil refuses to accept his fears as paranoia. And for a good reason too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly have no idea what went on in this prompt. Everyone watches the Finnish (Swedish? I forget which one uses the original name for the Groke) version of Moomins and everyone lives in some forested-back-woods in Sweden and apparently Mikkel and Sigrun are off-planet fighting the alien scourge, because they appear at no point in this fic.  
> Come back, Mikkel and Sigrun. You guys are my brotp.

By most accounts, Lalli’s partner is pretty normal.

He has done many of the normal things people are generally expected to do; went through school, fell in love and settled down (though he may be unusual for falling in that permanent kind of love at fifteen and settling down ten years later), went through university, got a good job and pays his taxes on time. He is pretty normal mentally as well. No mental illnesses to speak of- but with the rate of depression and anxiety these days, it might be more normal if Emil was one of the two, as Lalli is- and no physical crippling physical ailments.  
He wears a hearing aid in his left year because a head trauma he suffered at age eight left him with 70% hearing loss in that ear. But Lalli does not consider this weird. He met Emil when they were both ten and has never known him without the device curled around his ear like a little sleeping animal.

Of course, there are the ticks and oddities of personality, idiosyncrasies of habit and mannerism, a few unique bruises left by a set of semi-negligent parents (the hearing aid would not be necessary had his parents been appropriately vigilant with their son) and other small things which distinguish one person from the next and the next after that.   
Lalli has no complaints. Almost. It would be nice if Emil could eat more types of cheeses than brie, which Lalli considers a culinary mistake, and it would be great if he didn’t spend close to a half hour on hair-care every other morning. In the grand scheme of a committed relationship, these are tiny, surmountable annoyances. 

The one major thing which Lalli actually takes issue with is not something which really bothers him. It is more that he wishes Emil could live without it, as it would make his life abundantly easier and less stressful.

When Lalli was younger he was terrorised by all manner of childhood nightmares: shadow-people, closet monsters, murder-clowns under the bed, the stories of evil näkki and even more evil kades which his grandmother filled his head with to ensure he would not sneak out of the house at night. A few Internet memes even had their go at scaring him senseless when he was a teenager. The Rake, in particular, made sure he slept with his feet under the blankets every single night.

Emil used to make fun of him when they were teenagers, sneaking out, cutting up, causing light trouble with their friends and slowly falling in love in the way that childhood buddies will sometimes do.  
One night, at their friend (and Lalli’s new cousin-in-law) Reynir’s urgings, they hopped the fence of the town’s haunted house. It was an asylum, abandoned something like thirty years ago, and as terrifying as they had all hoped it would be.

Emil was scared up to a certain point. When Reynir started to tell them that murderers lurked in the halls still, he cracked up.

“Rey, we don’t have murderers here! We don’t even have a Pride parade here! What town do you think we live in?”

But Reynir was on a roll and refused to have sense talked into him “Course we do! There’s plenty of murderers here. What about your gardener? Creepy Hagsbard? Tell me he isn’t a murderer. He looks like Freddy Kruger’s little brother.”

“The one that got the looks out of the Kruger boys.” added Tuuri, Lalli’s cousin, whose parents had raised him like their own.   
This remark allowed everyone a nervous laugh. Except Emil. He was at ease and so was his laugh.

“You don’t seriously believe there are murderers in here, do you?” challenged Emil once more.

Reynir nodded “I do.”

“You are so strange, Reynir.”

“You’re stranger! You’re not afraid at all are you?”

“Nah.”

“Are you kidding me? You literally hide your face in the couch every time the Mårran from ‘Mumins’ is even mentioned-”

Emil shushed him, his face suddenly pale “Shut up, Reynir!”

“See? You’re doing it right now.”

“That’s different!”

Tuuri scoffed “How is it different? You’re not afraid of things that might actually kill you, but some grey-pillow-case thing scares you so bad you can’t sleep at night? And the freaking Lady of the Cold as well? You’re such a kid Emil!”

Emil didn’t try to defend himself “Hey, I have my fears and you have yours.”

“Yeah, but yours are dumber.” shot back Tuuri.

Lalli didn’t try to defend him either. At that moment, anyway. Later he poured saffron into her foundation, forcing her to go around as yellow as a banana for a week, smelling faintly of paella . The mention of the Mårran had unnerved him so that he grabbed Lalli’s hand every time they passed a window or an open door, which was often, until he eventually gave up hanging on then letting go and just held his hand for the rest of the night. 

The bottom line is this: many people grow out of the fear of monsters, except for moments of panic and irrationality, or when they’re watching some kind of paranormal TV show. Some cultures and households teach monsters as a fact of life, but neither his household nor Emil’s was one of these; monsters were just stories made for them when they were children, to give a face and fangs to the things which could really happen to them. Lalli grew and found the truth underneath. A truth of kidnappers and falls in the dark to break necks, of rabid wild animals and starvation for those who get lost in the woods.

Emil learned these truths too. But he left them in their original packaging. He was not afraid of being lost in the woods to starve and die if they took a wrong turn on a hike. Conversely, he would get spooked, imagining the Jersey Devil might, for some inconceivable reason, take a break from the Pine Barrens to come and torment a little wood in Sweden.   
Lalli has learned to take the overwhelming good with the bad. He cannot pretend he doesn’t enjoy it when Emil clings to him during horror movies he insists he will be alright to watch. And it’s kind of funny to watch Emil curl himself into a tight ball of covers after he puts ‘the Necronomicon’ or some such other horror novel down for the night. 

It just makes it a little bit hard to have a restful night sometimes.

 

Lalli gets home second, as usual. The job of a ranger-come-veterinarian is neither easy nor relaxing. Today, he was nipped by five species of dog who had come into the office to be checked for a dangerous strain of ticks, scratched by a feral cat that was terrorising a camp-site, stared-down by a large deer that was not at all pleased to see him sharing her game trail and finally swooped by an owl that seemed to do it for no other reason than to be obnoxious. Lalli doesn’t mind owls. The feeling is not mutual.

He closes the door quietly and slumps against the door to take off his boots. Crushed moss and ferns line the sole. His clothes smell of pine sap and the spruce tree he had to climb up to retrieve some dumb kid who tried to scale the tree (a 70 metre monster in the old-growth part of the woods) for a dare. Smallish town. The fire department are busy putting out fires from unattended candles and lit cigs, and Lalli was not about to wait an hour while this kid screeched that she was slipping about thirty metres over his head.  
He’ll catch hell for unsafe working practices. Maybe. His boss is pretty lenient. They say that Sigrun Eide once killed a wolf with her bare hands, when she was lost in the woods during the winter of ’08. She fought it for the lone wolf’s kill, and, upon winning, ate from the fresh deer carcass. That’s the way she tells the story anyway.

“Em?” he calls.

No response, except from the cat, who pads out of the living room and rubs up against his legs.

He stoops and scoops her up “So what did you do today?”

She puts a paw on his chin and tries to climb onto his shoulder.

“Interesting. One of your kinsmen tried to take my eye out. They only got my shoulder. No need to worry.”

The cat clambers as gracefully as she can manage onto the back of his neck and proceeds to shimmy down the back of his shirt. He knows better from bitter, bitter, bitter experience not to try to fish her out of there until he has somewhere equally warm and comfortable to put her instead.

“Em!” he tries again “Is your aid out again?”

When Emil takes out his hearing aid at home, his right and healthy ear takes on a kind of sympathetic deafness. Tuuri reckons it is because Emil has attached his ability to hear to the aid entirely, so that his mind just filters out all noises as background buzzing when it goes out, unless he is actively in conversation or listening to something.

Great. So no matter how loudly Lalli makes himself known he’s going to take Emil by surprise and scare him.  
This is the part of their relationship he hates.

He shrugs out of his coat on the second floor landing and places it, and the cat glaring at him on top of it, on the wooden shelf over the radiator.   
He tries again: “Emil! I’m coming into the bedroom now. Don’t throw anything at me. It’s just me.”

That’s not going to work. He’s tried it before. It just doesn’t work and they keep forgetting to install some kind of safe procedure whereby Lalli can greet his half-deaf partner without also launching said partner out of his seat in shock.

Lalli pushes the bedroom door open and cringes at the shriek of the hinges. He really should oil those things.

The bedroom is the same way he left it this morning; the bed neat and made, the books on their respective nightstands still in place and his own half-finished repair job on the downstairs curtain (which the cat treats like a child treats a jungle gym) flung over the bedspread for convenience.  
Also, a baseball bat. 

“Oh, perfect.”

Once in a blue moon, Emil will become absolutely convinced there is something in the house that is neither human nor friendly. For these occasions he keeps a Louisville slugger on his side of the bed. So far he has knocked out one unfortunate burglar and coaxed a wild raccoon out of the house with some gentle taps on the rear. He has not yet had to brain a troll or the Rake or whatever the hell it is he thinks is going to try to climb into bed with them.  
One time, Lalli came home late from a staff meeting to find Emil in the bathtub with the cat and the baseball bat. He had heard scratching in the wall and then a thunderous shout. The cause of his distress? Not a demon, as he suspected, but a bat trapped in the chimney downstairs and the neighbour shouting at her car to start.

Lalli crosses the room to the bathroom and tries to open the door. Locked. They never lock the doors on each other, even with this room.

He knocks “Em. Open the door.”

As he speaks, a creak of wood tells of another door opening behind him. Lalli turns.  
Something huge and hobbled and completely grey-skinned reaches at him from the depths of the closet, between his winter coat and Emil’s dinner jacket.

Lalli stands still.   
He is not sure of what he should do.

So rather than doing anything he just says “Alright.” 

And is immediately pulled backwards into the bathroom. He does not think he has ever been so glad to see his partner’s ‘oh-my-god’ face on before.

Emil is whiter than flour “Did you see that thing?”

He slams the door before Lalli can get a second look at it.

“Whatever that thing is, I sure did see it,” agrees Lalli as if he’s agreeing to a touch more sugar in his coffee than he normally takes “What is it?”

“It’s everything I ever worried would come after us- me! Anyone!” he drops his face into his hands for a moment “And me without my damned bat. I left it on the bed.”

Lalli pats him on the shoulder “Happens to the best of us…so, should we call the police?”

A withered appendage the width of a sheet of paper creeps under the door. Snatching a bottle of shampoo off the shower shelf, Emil brings the base down hard on the appendage, producing a raspy groan of either pain or surprise, until the grey thing retreats. 

“Yep!” Emil nods “Call the police!”


	49. 80: Words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Onni once suggested that keeping a journal is a good way to process your days and feelings. Lalli thought he might as well try it out. It's not like anyone around here can understand him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A first-person Lalli POV may be too tall of a challenge...but I went ahead and did it anyway because I evidently have no sense of self-preservation

Day 10

(Morning)  
It has just occurred to me that Reynir is a man. Could have fooled me. It’s not even his hair. His voice is very feminine. Manly feminine. Sounds like me before my voice broke and turned into this satanic rumble.  


I missed some very obvious hints  
1) Most girls don’t have Adam’s apples  
2) Most girls don’t have to shave their chins  
3) Most girls don't shamelessly watch boys change like it's nothing they've never seen before 

And yet I didn’t notice my mistake until Reynir was overcome by a full bladder this morning and had to do his business in the snow. I may have screamed. I may have felt quite betrayed. I may or may not have hidden behind Em and called Reynir a guileless tricksy Loki-spawn. At least I cursed him with his own gods.

Never thought I would be grateful that no one but Tuuri can understand my language on this gods-forsaken tank of idiots. Me talking about Reynir like he was a girl would have been bad. Embarrassing. Both. Normally mis-gendering people is not cause for screaming, but I was quite comfortable sharing the floor-space with Reynir because I thought he was a flat-chested girl with an Adam’s apple. Now that I realise he is a male, an attractive one at that, I feel almost obliged to be attracted to him.

One beautiful idiot is already too much for this trip. If Reynir intends to take Em’s position then I’m going to make them duel for the pleasure of confusing me for the rest of the mission. Victor wins the spoils. I tan the loser’s hide and wear it as a cloak of triumph or something.  
Gods I just want to nap until spring. 

(Early Afternoon)

Tuuri popped a seam in her bra again. Denies gaining weight and going up a cup-size. I told her she could lie to me but not her bras. I may have been bopped on the head with a book. Yet this mission has made a more courageous person of me, or at least, more willing to retaliate against beloved family members. I may have snatched the book away and bopped her back.  
We may have tackled each other and rolled around the floor of the tank until Mikkel came in and pried us apart with a broom. I’m not saying it really happened.

Possibly. And, in this hypothetical situation, I may still have an aching side from where Tuuri and her stupid, stout mechanic fingers scratched the crap out of my ribs. 

I am now in the closet. Tuuri won’t let me repair her undergarments in the open. I don’t blame her. If I took this outside Sigrun would probably mistake the thing for some kind of double-helmet and try to wear it into battle. Finished repair job without that much light in the closet. I poked myself with the needle close to fifteen times. I’m cursing myself for leaving my sewing kit in Keuruu. 

(Late evening)

Got back in from scouting fifteen minutes ago. Asked Tuuri to bring me my notebook so I could finish journaling while the disinfectant did its job. She tried to read it, but my handwriting is too messy to be deciphered.  
Until then I am banished outside with the dumb cat, who’s being punished or something for puking on Sigrun’s pillow.  
We’re getting busier as we go deeper into this stinking ghost-riddled wasteland. I won’t have time to write three entries each day anymore. Not if I want to eat and sleep regularly. On that note, I might as well just take a nap now. Reynir is awake so I should be able to relax a little, alone, in my haven, without him hammering to get in.

(Later evening)

I was wrong. He showed up two minutes later. I don’t know how he does it. I had to let him in and he babbled about his gods and trying to get in touch with his gods and made a gigantic daisy train.

Testament to my patience that I didn’t strangle him with the daisy train. I should have strangled him.

 

Day 12

(Afternoon)

Shot a deer this morning on the way back from scouting. Sigrun was so overcome with the prospect of eating actual food she kissed me full on the mouth. 

I’ve been in a tree for the past hour. Em’s trying to get me to come down. It ain’t happening.

 

Day 15

(Later evening)

Slept in a weird position so my back hurts. Woke up with the cat trying to crawl into my mouth. Tempted to let her then eat her. Am now partially laying on Em. He isn’t complaining. I can see him trying to make out what I write. Good luck. Even if he could read Finnish my hand-writing is so bad he would never be able to read what I write. 

Long day today. Had to run for a few hours nearly non-stop. Urban settings are far more challenging than countryside settings. Lots more things to cut myself on. There’s a slash on the inside of my left thigh. Mikkel wanted to give me stitches, so I hid under the blankets in Sigrun’s bunk and menaced him with a pair of scissors until he went away. Did it myself.  
My stitches are better than his. Can’t believe Sigrun submitted to letting him mangle her arm. Those scars are going to be hideous. Would have offered to re-stitch myself, except for fear that she might be transported by the suggestion and try to kiss me again.

Also I’m not here to be the medic. That’s Mikkel’s job. Shame our medic is terrible at his job. I guess if anyone gets really badly injured they’re just going to have to die. 

In the city, Sigrun found some building full of books. A huge store specifically for books. Didn’t know they had those in the old days. Tuuri peed a little bit when Sigrun told her. I’m not saying that sarcastically. She turned to me and told me she peed just a little bit. And she wonders why I don’t make the effort to spend more time with her.  
Sigrun head-butted a door open today. I didn’t need to understand the language she used to understand her reasoning. The door was weak. Her head is made of some kind of organic iron. She was curious to see if she was truly as hard-headed as she thinks she is. She is. I’m making a mental note and a note here that I should never get on her bad-side, in case she decides to lower that hard head and charge for me. 

If her crown can shatter open a few feet of solid wood then I don’t want to know what it can do to my ribcage.  
Em and I were duly impressed, though Emil was making his high-pitched distress noises in the moments leading up to Sigrun’s impressive feat of hard-headedness. I know what his distress noises sound like now because he makes them so often at me. Half the time I have no idea; if the squeaking is some vital component of the Swedish courtship ritual, you can count me the Hel out.

Predictably, we were attacked. Trolls were probably summoned by Em’s squawking. I don’t blame them. I kind of want to kill him whenever he starts doing that.  
I, myself, may have screamed. A little bit. 

Ok, no, in all honesty, I did scream, because the troll came through the floor right under my feet and I was standing on its head. But once I finished screaming I was very cool-headed and took quick control of the situation. I stabbed it in the eye with my knife and it went down. I didn’t look before I stabbed, though, and because of this over-sight I kind of may have trapped Sigrun under a troll.  
She was nice about it, I think? Her words didn’t sound mean or disgruntled. Amused, I think.  
I don’t know which is scarier. That Sigrun might put me on whatever that list is that she keeps scribbling names on or that she might think it’s funny have half a story of troll fat fall on her.

She’s weird.

I’m tired, so I’m going to sleep. I don’t think I’ll move either. If Em is prepared to let me use his lap as a headrest he is probably also prepared to let me use it as a mattress.

 

Day 20

(Evening)

Accidentally ate a bug today. Yawned too widely. It flew in before I knew what was happening.

That is all.

 

Day 27

(Afternoon)

Reynir fell in a snow-well. Almost. He was too tall to fall in properly, so it was just his torso and shoulders and his long arms flapping all over the place while the rest of him was stuck in the well. I would have screamed with laughter, except it occurred to me that the others have never heard me laugh. For a good reason.  
I held it in. Except it ended up coming out and I was crying silently while Mikkel pulled him out and Tuuri thought I was upset, so she made me go lay down.

Got my first proper (internal) laugh of the year and a free nap. A good day.

Day 32

(Morning)

Thigh-high boots are a terrible idea. My ankles are killing me.

Thigh-high boots are a terrible idea and I regret every choice I’ve made in my life. Ever. Including joining this mission.

 

Day 36

(Evening)

Scouted too hard today. Then Sigrun made me come along on another recon. I almost killed her. I actually did fall asleep right on her, which’ll learn her to deprive me of my sleep.  
I have no idea where we are. The names on the maps are just kind of blurs now. We’re somewhere I’ve never been before that is filled with things that want to kill us. Same old, same old. 

Never thought I’d miss Onni, but I do. I wish someone would cry on me and tell me I’m not old enough to make my own choices.

Em is talking to his flame-thrower. Unsure if this is normal for Swedes or not. If so, I’m not surprised. If not, I’m still not surprised. I think Em drinks lighter fluid when we aren’t looking.

 

Day 40

(Morning)

Have decided that I can do this. It makes a welcome break from scouting all the time. It’s maybe not good to be alone as much as I am alone in Keuruu. Other people are annoying, but not all bad.  
Even Tuuri.

We’ll go home in a few months and I might even be sad to leave the crew. Might.

Probably not.  
When Tuuri and me go home at least I don’t have to worry about a supersonic slap on the back from Sigrun every time I do something right.


	50. 36: Precious treasure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of the mission, Sigrun finds herself lonely for her old team. Also, she finds a rock that looks a lot like Mikkel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really have no excuse for this prompt. It's weird and long and nonsensical. Enjoy!

One thing Sigrun doesn’t expect is the loneliness.

She has no idea it was even going to be a thing that happened. After spending a few months in a cramped space with the same damned people day in and day out, she was sure she was going to get some relief from being away from them. And that is the way it is for a few weeks.   
For a few weeks, it is nice to sleep without Tuuri’s snores in her ears, Reynir’s sleep-mewling underneath that and the odd tremendous snort from Mikkel. It is nice to eat food with real food in it, made by hands which do not also stitch and clean her up every time she injures herself. It is nice to get some intelligent conversation going with a scout for once, instead of just trading bewildered, semi-awkward stares, surly grunts and exhausted sighs.

And then, all at once, it stops being nice.

Sigrun wakes one morning a few weeks after returning to Dalsnes and tries to sit up. She is immediately pushed back down by a feeling of intense and biting isolation. Suddenly, she misses the snores and mewls and snorts. She misses the language of stares and animal noises. Most of all and most fiercely, she misses Emil.

Then she remembers she brought Emil with her and springs up to see him.

Emil has been doing well in Dalsnes. The few scars he picked over the winter (convinced each time that he would die if he was not first disfigured beyond recognition) were enough to earn him token respect. This grew into a genuine fondness and respect for him, once it became clear to Sigrun’s unit that he was actually competent and kind underneath the bluster that the Silent World had not completely stripped from him.  
Sigrun decided she would bring him back with her for training on maybe the third day of the mission. She took an immediate liking to him, for some reason. Later on he managed to prove that he deserved it.

So Emil sleeps just down the hall from her. In the barracks, with the other newbies. He is the only one among them who has not yet broken down in tears with homesickness, or woken up with the screaming terrors.   
Sigrun steals into the room and creeps through the sound of shifting sleepers to Emil’s bottom bunk. Lucky for her, he is pressed over against the wall. He will not notice if she sits down beside him. she does, then lays down and makes him move his head.

Emil wakes up five minutes later and is slightly perturbed to find his captain prostrated on top of half of his bedding.

“Sigrun?” he yawns.

Her arms are folded over her belly in a position of thoughtfulness and rest “I’ve been doing some hard thinking, soldier.”

“Oh. Um, about what.”

“About us. The future.”

She turns to look at him and realises, from the look of horror on his face, that he thinks she is about to propose or something.

Before she can clarify, he blurts softly “Um, you know I’m gay, right? Not half gay? Like, all the way gay?”

She scoffs “Yeah I knew that. I’m talking about bringing the crew back together. We made a great team out there. Maybe the best team I’ve ever been a part of. I got kinda attached to those silly bastards.”

Emil nods, suddenly melancholic “I do miss Mikkel. And Lalli and the others. I wish Tuuri would write more often.”

“Have you noticed she puts that same squeal in her letters when she’s excited?”

“What, the ‘eee’?”

“Yeah! The ‘eee’!”

They amuse themselves for a while by making the Tuuri-‘eee’ until someone lifts their head on the opposite bunk and barks “Shut up!”

The talk with Emil salvages the day for her. Though she does not have another chance to talk with him that day, what, with being busy with her captain business and the soldiers, who have gotten quite needy in her absence. But just knowing Emil is at Dalsnes with her makes her feel better.  
Sigrun wonders if it is not quite selfish of her for wanting the rest of the team here as well.

At the end of the day, she returns to her room in spirits that are rapidly lowering. She is just about to toss herself onto her bed for a good scream into the pillow when Ylva the mailwoman knocks on the door. Pasting on her best ‘I’m totally fine’ face, Sigrun turns “Got something for me?”

“I think so? It’s got your name on it.”

“Well then it’s probably for me- hey, hey, why is it opened already?”

Ylva passes her the letter without a hint of guilt “Well there was something in the envelope. I opened it to make sure it wasn’t a bomb or something.”

There is indeed a pea-sized lump in the envelope. Sigrun fixes the mailwoman with a steady glare “You thought this was a bomb? Who’s trying to bomb me then, the pixie people? My parents told you to search my mail for a ring again didn’t they? How much did they pay you this time?”

Ylva inspects the ink-stained quicks of her fingernails “Nothing monetary. Mr General may have promised to set aside a flagon of his best ale for me, and Mrs General may have said something about a cake, but this is all hypothetical, you understand.”

“Your name’s going on the list.”

“Which list?”

“All of them.”

Sigrun closes the door in her face, then, sighing, tips the tiny thing out into her hand. She can’t quite believe what she holds at first.   
A tiny, perfectly carved hannunvaakuna. Sigrun turns the seal over in her hands. It is made of stone, monochromatic in grey, and done with immense skill.

She pulls out the letter and finds a few words in a spidery hand-writing. She recognises this hand-writing; it was in the margins of Tuuri’s maps, when Lalli wanted to note down an especially threatening threat for fear that they might forget about it and blunder into certain death.  
Apparently Lalli has also figured out how to write confidently and accurately in Norwegian since she last saw him.

The letter says: ‘Stick this on your sword and you might not die before next winter’ 

He does not sign his name. He does not need to.

Ylva hammers on the door and calls through “Is it a lover? They sound like they care about you!”

Sigrun whips off her boot and tosses it at the door “Nope! Just a friend. A good friend.”

Emil comes in ten minutes later to show her he has received the same thing, except with the suggestion that he puts it on his flame-thrower or wears it as a pendant, since he came close to self-immolation about seven times last winter.  
Sigrun pretends she is not amused by Lalli’s effort for Emil. If he can use the phrase ‘self-immolate’ already, then he has obviously been learning his languages with a focus on Emil’s areas of interest.

 

Weeks pass. Emil gets his first letter from Reynir- in Icelandic of course, since Reynir seems to have forgotten that Emil can neither speak nor read very much of his language. Sure, by the end of the winter, they were all pretty much able to understand Reynir when he was scared or happy or hungry or had stubbed his toe on something and was employing some of the foulest words in the Icelandic vocabulary to describe how he felt about this- but the communication was limited.  
Emil applies himself to the task of figuring out what the holy Hel Reynir is trying to say dutifully. He ignores his Norwegian team-mates when they tease him for hitting the books.

Sigrun is proud, of course, and feels a slightly unreasonable urge to brag about him to everyone like she produced him herself. 

Even with Emil around, Sigrun is lonely. She can’t help it. She has found herself missing Mikkel. It’s been a long time since she knew someone who wasn’t afraid to challenge her authority, opinions, beliefs and haircut. It’s been a long time since she met one of those people and liked them too.

One day, while on patrol on her own, Sigrun takes a mis-step in the snow and ends up waist-deep in a drift. As she curses and kicks her way out of the mess, her hands scrabbling for purchase, she ends up slashing her palm open. When she is out and kneeling, getting her breath back, she finds she cut herself on a rock about the size of her fist.   
Sigrun does a double-take. Is it her imagination, or does the rock look a lot like Mikkel?

 

“Why is there a rock in your pocket?” asks Emil, three days later.

Sigrun takes her coat from him and pulls it on “Good luck charm.”

“Lalli’s wasn’t enough for you?”

“Can never have too much luck on your side.”

Emil nods thoughtfully, then adds “That rock kind of looks like Mikkel.”

 

Reynir’s letters get thicker and longer. Then the packages start to come. The first time Sigrun sees the sweater, she falls over laughing. Ylva does too. It is a bonding moment.   
But she wears it proudly, even though it makes Emil cringe with suppressed laughter every time she squeezes her muscle into the fluffy blue thing Reynir made for her. Two weeks later he gets one of his own. Fire-proof, Reynir assures him, so you can wear it when you train. Emil is less ready to laugh at Sigrun now.

 

Finally, Mikkel gets in touch. He apologises for going dark for the last few months and offers up the excuse of being stuck in the small hell that is his family’s farm. His letter is ten pages long. Sigrun reads it three times over with the rock pinning down the pages on her desk. She stays up half the night writing him a twenty page letter, which goes into a package, along with another of Reynir’s yarn atrocities, a few letters from Tuuri and another charm from Lalli.

She finishes the letter with: “Next time you go dark, for the love of all the gods, leave us a mailing address so we at least know where to send our complaints”

 

Six months after what the media has now begun to call ‘The Long Winter’, Sigrun gets a surprise. The surprise is white-blonde, more muscular in the forearms since she last saw her, still short, still stocky and still smiling. Sigrun almost does not notice her; she is in the middle of chewing out one of her more lazy soldiers for not cleaning his rifle properly before target practice, which caused him to shoot wonky and clip another soldier in the leg, when Tuuri pads to her side and waits patiently for Sigrun to finish.

“…if you do that one more time, Jan, I’m gonna kick your ass from here to the ravaged isles of Britain! Now get Takeshi to the infirmary before he goes septic! MARCH!!”

“Wow,” says Tuuri “You sure know how to handle them.”

Sigrun lets out a disgusted sigh “They’re a good group, but I swear, sometimes it’s like herding a bunch of drunk sheep.”

“Drunk sheep?”

“Reynir was talking about it. Sheep eat fermented fruit. They go whacky- TUURI! TUURI, WHEN DID YOU GET HERE?!”

Their reunion is a shrieking, spinning affair and summons half of Sigrun’s team from the training pitch. They have come to defend her, thinking she is being attacked by some kind of troll, but find her instead spinning a chubby Finnish skald around and screaming about drunk sheep.

“Is that a rock in your pocket,” laughs Tuuri, gasping for breath at the same time “Or are you just happy to see me?”

“Both!”

“Why- why are you carrying a rock around?”

“For luck. Look, it looks like Mikkel.”

“Holy gods. It really does.”

 

Lalli follows her a week later. He turns up on the edge of the woods that border the military base and watches yet another training session for about ten minutes before Sigrun notices him. By a strange coincidence, she is shouting at the same lazy soldier for shooting the same unfortunate other again.

“…through his hand instead of his forehead, and it didn’t take off a finger! I’ve got half a mind to bite all of yours off you lazy bastard! Now get your butt off this training pitch and don’t let me see it until the evening meal, or you’re gonna clean out the toilets for two weeks instead of just one!”

Lalli sidles up to her side “What did he do?”

The Norwegian is so confident that Sigrun does not notice the Finnish accent at first “Shot a comrade through the hand. He never cleans his rifle, so the sight is always cock-eyed or the muzzle is dirty and something goes wrong. This is the fifth time he’s shot that one guy as well. I may have to fire him just to keep him from killing Takeshi.”

Lalli squints at the training field “Which one is Takeshi?”

“The bloody one. Over there, on the stre- LALLI! WHEN DID YOU GET HERE?”

He does not try to evade her hug, though he stiffens at her touch as if it is a troll getting in his personal space rather than a friend. Boss. A person he doesn’t hate.

“Ten minutes ago,” he says, muffled in her shoulder.

Sigrun holds him out at arm’s length “Gods! What happened to your face?”

“You mean my eyebrow?”

There’s a scar splitting his left eyebrow. It looks pretty dashing, actually, and Sigrun is jealous that she does not have one of her own. Most of her scars are in places is it is not considered polite nor practical to display in public. 

“Had to kill a troll with your bare hands again?” she asks eagerly, having seen him do it no less than seven times over the winter. The kid has no patience for trolls getting up in his face.

“No. I cut my head open when I was scouting in Keuruu.”

“So…so what you tripped over a log?”

He averts his eyes “Onto a log.”

“Man, you better make up a better story. Let me do it, in fact, I’ll explain it to the soldiers over dinner and you don’t have to do a thing but nod silently and look tortured, ok? Just like you normally do.”

 

Sigrun does not hope for anymore serendipitous coincidences, like the one which got her favourite skald and scout in Dalsnes. Lalli is now attached to her unit as a spare and extra scout, considering their usual one, Takeshi, keeps getting shot by some fool with a dirty rifle. Tuuri is here to help a team of skalds attempting to recreate one of the ancient war machines that was described in the texts they brought back from the Long Winter.  
This means Tuuri is cooped up in a big garage with a bunch of other sweaty, slightly manic mechanics and a lot of stripped engines and vehicles. Meanwhile, Sigrun is perfectly content with Emil and Lalli on her team. Well, most of the time, they’re kind of in a world that is populated just by the two of them. She guesses having an awkward puppy-love relationship is made a lot easier now that Lalli understands most of what Emil says. Most of it. 

 

She talks to the rock when she is sure on her own. About her day and how her parents have been dropping hints that are more and more obvious that they would like grandchildren soon, please, and at this stage it does not necessarily matter where they come from.  
She informs the rock when she is pleased with Emil’s progress, or was unexpectedly amused by something Lalli said earlier in the day, or if Tuuri and her gang of obsessive gearhead weirdoes have made some progress with their foray into ancient technology, or how much of Reynir’s latest letter she has been able to read through.

She also informs the rock of the mundane details of her day. Today, she has told it about the pleasant dream she had about biting a troll to death with teeth like a fox’s, then the ten kilometre run she took to wake herself up and how disgusted Emil seemed with her when she tried to rouse him to join her. Also, of her general impatience that the person whom the rock resembles so strongly would get his rear and gear and get out to Dalsnes.

The old crew is almost completely together. There has been talk of Reynir being posted here at the end of the year when he is due for work experience; someone at the mage academy up in Iceland figured out he was actually THAT Reynir that accidentally got himself on the mission of the century by impersonating a crate of tuna, and then decided that Reynir should capitalise off the link to the mighty Captain Eide by coming out to Dalsnes. Something like that.  
Sigrun is pretty sure that the phrase ‘the mighty Captain Eide’ was employed at least twice during the decision making process and has told the Mikkel-rock as much many times.

“All I’m saying? The real Mikkel better bring his butt down here soon, or I’m gonna march up to Bornholm and get it myself.” says Sigrun. 

She and the rock sit in a companionable silence, until Tuuri’s voice breaks the silence.

“Are you talking to that rock again?”

“Quiet, Stubby! The rock and I are having a moment!”

 

Across the world, Mikkel is having a similar moment. He happened to find a special kind of rock a few months ago, which was both unusual and valuable for looking almost exactly like Sigrun. He picked it up and has kept it in his pocket since then. Sometimes, he takes the rock out and talks to it as he would Sigrun. When he finds himself, rather unexpectedly, missing the crew of incompetents he for some reason became attached to, he’ll take out the rock and tell the rock about these unexpected complications.

He is doing that right now, on top of the roof of the family barn while his twin sister searches for him below, undoubtedly wanting to rope him into another thrilling game of ‘where did I leave my reading glasses this time’. 

“…organisation has dragged its feet, but apparently they have finally decided I should stick close to the team. In two months they will be cleared for another mission. This is strictly between you and I, you understand. The Council is not even aware that they will clear the group for another mission. The organisation has realised the information I may be able to gather on the sly is far too valuable to consider not collecting, you know?”

The rock knows. It seems to nod.

“All said and done, I may be going on to Dalsnes within the month. It depends on my orders. But I have a fair idea of what those orders might be.”

“Mikkel!” roars his sister from down below “Get off the roof! Are you up there with that stupid rock again?”

“Quiet, Mikkela! The rock and I are having a moment!”


	51. 28: Sorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun thinks on the unique effect the Silent World has on people, or, as she calls it, the Screaming Terrors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mentions of depression and PTSD. Oh dear.

At the end of a long day in the Silent World, Sigrun used to like nothing better than to dash back to her bunk and throw herself into the warmth and security of another night of pleasant dreams- bashing monsters in her sleep, of the gods that she serves in doing this and occasionally of that one super-cute guy she used to date back when she was an insecure teenager and actually needed romance to validate her. Ha. How times have changed.

In more way than one, because now, she is not able to hurl herself into bed and sleep for the solid eight or so hours she prefers.

“Why is the scout in my bed?” she asks to no one in particular.

As is his custom, Mikkel answers from the next room “Let him sleep. He’s tired.”

Sigrun gives Lalli a tentative poke in the shoulder “From what? All he did was sleep for a few days.”

Tuuri’s jumps in, also from the next room “He was in a magical coma. He lost a part of his soul, so he’s actually really, really fatigued. Sorry about that. He probably just collapsed on the first thing that wasn’t, um, stone or the floor. Do you want me to move him? I can put him on the floor.”

Does Sigrun detect a little barb of resentment buried in that question? A snark? Is Tuuri snarking at her?  
By Thor’s bristly beard. She is. That’s a first.

“No,” Sigrun grins to herself and pokes him one more time for good measure “That’s fine. I’ll just share the floor with Reynir tonight.”

Great. A night of chewing braid and getting kicked by cold feet and grabbed by calloused shepherd’s hands. The amount of times Sigrun has woken up to find Lalli struggling out of Reynir’s stubborn and sleepy grasp is crazy. Civvie must be missing his body pillow or something. A grumpy, bity mage is probably not the best replacement, but Reynir has yet to realise this.  
Neither is a seasoned troll-hunter, but Sigrun will strive to be a little less toothy than Lalli when she shakes off Reynir the following morning. It is best for their scout’s health after all.

Speaking of the useless tuna impersonator: “Mikkel! Where’d the civvie go?”

“He’s outside with Emil.”

She is about to depart when she notices that her poking has dislodged Lalli from his blankets. She pauses to tuck them up to his chin “Doing what?” 

“I don’t know. A braiding train, probably.”

Tuuri giggles. 

Sigrun has really got to do something about the level of sass on this tank. It’s going to turn toxic in here any day now.

She resolves to go and fetch the boys inside. It’s got a little too dark to leave Reynir outside, and she planned to terrify Emil with an anecdote of her exploits in Dalsnes before she let him sleep tonight. 

“Sleep well, you bunk-robbing grump-machine,” she pats Lalli on the forehead.   
He stirs under her hand and turns his face to the wall with something that is either a sigh or a hiss. Possibly both.

Outside, Emil and Reynir are not busy braiding each other’s hair. They are not even sitting together; Reynir is sitting a little bit in front of Emil on a flat rock, seemingly unaware that he has company, while Emil is behind him, watching the horizon darken in silence. Emil must have come out of his own accord to watch out for Reynir.  
Sigrun feels a spark of pride at the sight and goes over to muss his hair, but she does not speak. She does not want to rouse Reynir from whatever day-dream he has found his momentary solace within. They are just staring at the edge of the woods, or more likely, at the expanse of dead city which can be seen rising beyond it.

Like the fingers of some great, battered giant which has just begun the arduous process of clawing its way out from under the soil.

Emil scoots over to make room for her. 

Reynir is kind of mesmerising to stare at from behind. The convoluted shapes his braid bends into at the top reminds her of a carving, or of the natural shapes that tree branches make when they knot and flow together in a winter canopy. The way he looks right now, Sigrun almost expects to see an elf’s face peering at her underneath the red mess of his hair when he turns.

She is not sure what mages are. She has known plenty in her time. And not one single one that she has ever known or met or dated has ever been totally human. There is just something strange about mages she does not know how to classify, except that some of them smell like death. Not Lalli. Lalli smells like snow and pine trees and hormonal grump. Reynir smells faintly of sheep, then more strongly of spring, for some reason, and new grass. 

Right now, he looks like he is really missing his sheep and the Icelandic grass. 

Home-sickness can come up on even the most experienced veterans. A little lost civvie who arrived in the Silent World without a bit of preparation, via a box of tuna for crying out loud, has no chance against its ravaging effects. He may well go nuts within the hour. Or, more likely, the feeling of isolation and fear will just dog him for the rest of the winter and make itself known when he does get back on familiar soil, through hysterical depression or PTSD or something like that. Lots of people lose it the moment they get somewhere safe, when it’s finally alright for them to lower their guard. 

She has seen it before. Men and women and others who seemed as sound as houses one minute, then were sagging into their foundations the next and dragging their egos down into the sinkhole with them. It’s never pretty. It’s always sad.   
It’s just what the Silent World does to people.

The world around them is just that, at the moment. Totally silent. The Silent World really lives up to its name at night. The few animals that make themselves known during the day are chased into their burrows and dens by the sinking of the sun. Trolls move at night. A lot more during the day, since the types which can be burned by the sun no longer have to worry about that pesky UV, and sometimes a whole bunch of trolls will get up and shuffle about for no particular reason, apparently, other than that they are enjoying their freedom from the sun.  
It makes no sense for a predator to waste energy. But then, moments like those are definitely the most human moments Sigrun has ever seen any troll have. A desiccated, diseased corpse strutting its stuff down a cracked main-street just because it can.

While she is used to it, her crew is not. Well, who knows what Mikkel is used to; the man gives about as much away as a miser would share of their gold. Maybe Mikkel was raised in the wild by benevolent trolls and that whole story about a family of eight with the cows and the twins and the crazy father that tries to wrestle bears every time he steps off the farm is just a cover-story. Still, the fact remains that the kids, the skald and the civvie in particular, have not seen much in the way of troll action.   
Emil’s job was to burn stuff after the trolls had been wiped out or spotted in the area. He would have been so young and inexperienced when he started, so kept away from the front-line with the rest of the newbies. He would have only seen the shadows of the trolls his commanding officers dispatched, and smelled the hot, fetid meat-stink their bodies throw off when burnt. 

And Lalli? Again, Sigrun wonders about whether or not it is possible to have a human baby raised by trolls. She knew a kid back in Dalsnes whose parents died, making the kid run into the woods in grief, and not five years later a feral man-beast is discovered in the woods, wearing a bunch of rabbit pelts and loping around with a wolf pack. Barely any language left to him.  
That might explain why Lalli doesn’t talk. Even to Tuuri. Either that or this ‘Onni’ character Sigrun hears so much about did not know what he was doing when he tried to make a normally functioning human being out of Lalli.

Where was she going with this? Troll Tarzans? No- no, she was thinking about the Screaming Terrors.

“So called,” she says aloud to Emil “Because they’re the inverse of what you get in the Silent World. When some poor sap spends too much time hearing their own heart-beat and nothing else, they start trying to make as much noise as possible. Every now and then, you get some scout or soldier coming back out of the Silence who just can’t stop screaming. You know what the Silence is, Em?”

He shakes his head.

“Sound of our ancestors’ death. It’s the sound of death. The sound of everything that died when the Rash ate it up.”

Emil shivers and moves a little closer to her “What were you talking about?”

Sigrun opens the clasp on her cloak (which she just discovered in her luggage- she completely she forgot she packed this, but is glad of its company, because the Silent World whips up some pretty intense winds) and throws half of it over Emil’s shoulders “The Screaming Terrors. That thing that makes people loopy after they leave the Silent World.”

He nods “Oh, yeah. We called that the Little Rash.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It’s the second worst thing that can happen to you in the Silent World.”

“What about dying?”

He shrugs “I didn’t make the name up.”

Sigrun gives him a searching look “You let me know if you feel a dose of the Little Rash coming on, alright?”

Emil looks a little embarrassed by the suggestion “Oh. Ok. I mean, I’ve never had it before. I guess I’m just not…not smart enough to fully realise the real awfulness behind all this stuff we see? Not like Reynir.”  
He gestures to their slump-shouldered civilian. He looks like he might burst into tears at any moment. Or has already done so and is weeping silently.

“Then you’re like me. Kinda. I’ve only had one attack of the Screaming Terror of the Little Rash. That was just me crawling under this rotted-out old bed in a kid’s bedroom in this tiny town outside Stockholm and crying so hard I got dehydrated. Uncle Trond pulled me out and gave me a hug. First time he ever hugged me, you know? Then he smacked me and told me to pull myself together.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course not! I had depression! That stuff stuck on me like tar until I turned twenty, then it just kind of left. You think if you slapped your aunt hard enough then all of her demons would come flying out of one ear and she’d be fine? Uncle Trond is many things. A mental health professional is definitely not one of them. And don’t say you’re stupid.”

“Huh?”

“I totally believe you’re smart enough to go whack over this. Your mind is just waiting for a safe space to go whack. I guarantee, the moment you get back to Mora, you’re gonna get the biggest case of the Screaming Terrors there ever was.”

“Wow. Thanks.” says Emil so flatly Sigrun has to look twice to make sure Mikkel hasn’t ducked under the cloak with them.

Now that Emil is taken care of, what should she say to Reynir? The boy is an enigma. Well kinda. Ok, she just has no idea what he is saying and vice versa, so they don’t understand each other at all. Reynir is pretty simple. Sugary heart and sweet intentions all around.   
Sigrun just doesn’t know what to say to him because meeting people like that is a rare and cherished pleasure. She is used to talking seasoned warriors into a better state of mind, jerks and troll-killers and people who sold their senses of humour to the Christian Devil for more punching strength, not a kid who misses his family and his sheep. 

“Ok, time for you to go in.” she shoos Emil back towards the tank “Go on, kiss your boyfriend goodnight.”

His face turns a fantastic shade of red “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He speed-walks back to the tank before Sigrun can present her comprehensive argument as to why it is totally obvious that Emil has a huge thing for Lalli. What a shame. She’ll bring it out later, maybe when Lalli is within earshot. It won’t make a lick of sense to him, of course, but Sigrun will get the satisfaction of meddling while both of her victims are present.

She stands “Reynir.”

He looks up and offers her a weak smile. Sigrun wraps her cloak around his shoulders and is surprised at the solidity of him. The wiry strength she has only just now realised his every muscle must be infused with. Of course; he is a shepherd. This is just the first time she has touched him, she thinks, so up to this point he has been like a soap bubble floating around in the corner of her eye.

Reynir, too, is surprised to suddenly be swathed and coddled by her. She must have seemed like a distant, slightly sinister and evil figure up until now- now that she’s here, putting him in an old, warm woollen cloak that smells of home-made soap and a foreigner’s home.

“Time to sleep.” she jerks her head in the direction of the tank “Quit staring at the city, alright? You’ll give yourself the Screaming Terrors at this rate.”

Reynir understands. The first part. He rises and walks back to the tank, with her hand on his shoulder and guiding him into the relative safety of the team’s little fortress.

Sigrun doesn’t claim to be all-powerful. She knows she gives the impression of it, and of incredible competence and strength and ability and all those good things, but really, she’s just as much of an ape as every other human. Struggling and bungling along in the wasted world their ancestors left them.  
Doing her best and suffering terribly when that best is not enough to hold back the harshness of this reality. And while she may not be able to protect them, her crew, Reynir especially, from this new and old and dead and Silent World around them, she is pretty certain that she can at least hold the Screaming Terrors at bay.

She has found something as simple as having a cloak wrapped around your shoulders on a cold night can be the difference between drowning in hopelessness, and bobbing up out of that drowning hopelessness as stubborn as a cork, to live out and fight through another day in the Silent World.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to say, as a diagnosed sufferer of a disease mentioned in this particular prompt, I find the idea of being able to slap one's demons out of one's ears immensely amusing.


	52. 56: Murder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the sake of her team, Sigrun is forced to cross the line between civilisation and madness.

The relative silence of the evening is shattered by a tremulous shriek, an impressive thud, a scrabble of bare feet and toenails up the side of the tank, and one more scream for good measure.

Mikkel and Reynir, who have just finished taking the last of the clothes off the line, are the first to look up and see Tuuri shrieking for all she is worth. 

“Tuuri?” says Mikkel “What in heaven’s name are you doing?”

The incandescent fear of the moment has caused Tuuri to lose her command of Icelandic. She reverts back to her first and most comfortable tongue to shrill “SNAKE! GODS-DAMNED HIISI SNAKE!”

This alerts Lalli. He springs up from the rock where he was taking in the last of the sun, shaking off the doze. Unexpectedly, he shouts. Sigrun jumps nearby and nearly chops her thumb off with the knife she was sharpening. Shouts are to be expected from Tuuri, who is known to scream at dust bunnies she mistakes for very light spiders and hairballs she mistakes for little beasts that want to infect her.  
To hear Lalli communicate in anything other than a grunt or a long, uncomfortable stare is beyond strange.

“What do you mean?” he calls in Finnish.

“HIISI! THERE’S A HIISI SNAKE THE SIZE OF MY LEG IN THE COCKPIT! KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT…” her words devolve into a hysterical chant. 

The others look back and forth between Tuuri screaming on top of the tank, barefoot and in her undershirt, and Lalli, who has just gone very stiff and pale.

“Is this some kind of magical ritual?” whispers Reynir to Mikkel.

“Search me.”

Lalli breezes past him. There’s a thump and a hiss inside the tank and Lalli emerges seconds later, with yet another surprise in store for them; he holds the cat. He has never let the cat touch him before except when she cuddled up to him when he slept, when he could not resist her purring advances.  
Holding the animal like something disgusting he just fished out of the gutter, he deposits her on top of the pile of laundry and pivots on his heel, charging back into the tank.

Sigrun marches over with her bloody thumb in her mouth “What the Hel is going on?”

“Something significant, going by the noises Tuuri is making.”

Sigrun glances up at Tuuri with something between exasperated affection and disdain “She’s pretty damned agile, isn’t she? Hey, what’s wrong with the cat?”

The cat has inflated her fur to the point that her little features are lost in the storm of fluff. 

Everything dawns on everyone at once.

Sigrun charges in after Lalli, blood flying in a ribbon from her lacerated thumb.

“Oh my gods! Where did Emil go?” cries Reynir, dashing off in a random direction, his hands fumbling at the mask around his neck. 

This leaves Mikkel with the harassed cat and the laundry in his arms. Mikkel sighs. He takes a seat on the rock that Lalli abandoned and soothes the cat with soft words and a few gentle, hesitant pets. It is hard to convince the little thing that she is going to be alright, with Tuuri still mewling on top of the tank. And then there are the noises coming from inside.

An echoing war-cry from Sigrun. A shout of surprise from Lalli as she probably barrels into him. Then twin cries of anger and revulsion as they identify what scared Tuuri so. A hair-rising, rasping hiss. Another bellow from Sigrun. Another hiss from whatever the heck a ‘hiisi’ is, then one from Lalli which Mikkel recognises as the noise he makes when he sees a troll.

Briefly, Mikkel considers getting up to help.

“But then who would guard the laundry?” he says to the cat.

Obviously, this situation is already far too chaotic to attempt to bring under control. The best thing to do here is to sit on his wide rear and regret his life choices until Sigrun reappears to restore order.

Something long and grey and superlatively enraged rockets out of the door, flicked at a great speed and with deadly accuracy into a nearby tree. The cat scrambles down the front of Mikkel’s shirt and shivers underneath his collarbone, her tail poking out under his throat, something like that awful beard he wore as a nineteen year old when he had not quite mastered the art of shaving without also dabbling in the art of self-flaying.

The thing writhes in the snow. Tuuri screams louder. It is a giant, corpse-coloured snake. Half of one. its bottom half is gone, and the stump where it used to be weeps a blackened, tarry substance that might have once been flowing blood.

“Ew.” announces Mikkel.  
Great. That black gunk is probably all over the tank.

Sigrun emerges from the tank with Lalli under her arm- quite literally under her arm, for no apparent reason other than that it occurred to her she is able to pick him up. She drops him on his feet and launches herself at what is left of the snake with yet another rousing battle cry.

What Mikkel watches next will haunt him for the rest of his days.  
There are things that can be done to humanity’s slithery brethren that no one, reptile or mammal, should ever have to bear witness to. But Sigrun is ruthless. Sigrun tosses aside all conventions of civilisation, all irrelevant ideas of mercy, and flings herself and her knife at her hapless prey with something beyond bloodlust in her eyes.

Tuuri faints. Lalli walks calmly around the side of the tank and can be heard throwing up. For the first time since he was a child hiding from the monsters that climbed from his head and into his closet at night, Mikkel covers his eyes.

Sigrun delivers the finishing blow just as Reynir arrives, literally dragging Emil in tow. The former takes one look at the scene Sigrun and the sick snake and her knife have made, and copies both Lalli and Tuuri. Emil catches him before he can finish swooning. It seems only force of habit keeps Emil standing.

Sigrun straightens up and cracks her neck “Well, gentlemen, Tuuri, it seems we’ve got a mutated strain on our hands. Now the Rash can get into reptiles.”

Everyone is silent for a moment.

Then Emil says in a very weak, very quiet voice “I was gone for five minutes. Five minutes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And Emil never peed again. Not in the woods, at least.
> 
> Kind of hurt to write this one. I told myself it was a sick snake so it didn't think like normal snakes, but we've seen sick dogs with traces of the domesticated nature in them. I love the heck out of snakes. They're like big worms with puppy faces and tongues that come out all the time to give your nose a kiss. And of course incredibly dangerous and well-designed hunters, but so cute!!!  
> I comfort myself with the thought that Sigrun did a mercy killing. The snake is now in snakey heaven, with Apophis and   
> Kaa and other famous snakes.
> 
> (But I betcha thought this was going to involve human murder. Heh heh, no. Yes, writing misleading summaries is all I have to do with my time these days. )


	53. 76: Sexy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mysteriously attractive man arrives, asking for Mikkel. Mikkel cannot be reached. Neither can Sigrun. Reynir investigates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another long, rambling prompt. I am apparently unable to write anything related to Mikkel without shoe-horning my head-canon twin for him in there as well.

The day is passing slowly and pleasantly until Tuuri, being Tuuri and always being on the prowl for some eligible young men to admire, spots a man who is so amazingly attractive she has to demand that her friends stop everything they are doing and:

“Look at him! Have you ever seen such toned pecs?”

“Who?” Emil spins around.

“Where?” Reynir cranes his neck to look over Emil’s shoulder.

Emil catches sight of him first “Oh. Oh. Ok. Yeah, no, I haven’t seen…a, a musculature like that outside of…of classical art references in a while. Um…I’m not going to look at that.”

Though the object of Tuuri’s desire is dressed in the usual furs and thick blankets, his figure is easy to see. Straining against the seams of a coat that seems to be barely containing him. Pressing into the contours of the clothing so that the beautiful, even body underneath hardly needs to be imagined.  
Tuuri never thought she might become fiercely jealous of a coat. Some of the people around them are obviously having the same thoughts; a lot of women slow as they pass with swords, crates and unconscious comrades to take appreciative looks at whatever is going on with the man’s behind. A few of the men, too, stop to stare, though most of them seem to be doing so out of jealousy rather than lust.

His face beet-red, Emil turns back around, hunches his shoulders and buries his face in the book open in front of him. Reynir is less reluctant to look- after all, the male form holds no mysteries for him, and nor does it hold any attraction.

“I bet those are fake. Probably…no they actually look really. Wow. You have to be really talented to keep muscles like that.” he finally admits grudgingly.

Tuuri nods, satisfied in the way that a fisherman who has just pulled out a prize catch might be when the other fishermen surround her to congratulate her on snagging such a fine specimen “How old do you think he is?”

“Too old for you.” says Emil sharply.

“Oh, please. Honey, I’m twenty-four. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself. He’s probably too much man for you anyway.”

“No arguments there.” says Emil through gritted teeth “I have exactly as much of the male gender as I need.”

Referring to Lalli, of course, with whom he has just hit the two-and-a-half-years mark. It, of course, warms Tuuri’s heart to hear him talk about her cousin like this. Lalli doesn’t have to worry about dying alone as long as Emil doesn’t accidentally blow himself up or something.

“Hey, he’s coming this way.”

Emil swears. Tuuri fixes an inviting smile on her face in anticipation and Reynir pretends he is looking at some pattern in the wood of the table.

“Excuse me,” says the man in a deep and seasoned voice, tapping Emil on the shoulder “You’re Västerström, aren’t you?”

Emil snaps his book shut. He looks up at the man and opens his mouth. Then shuts it. Then tries again.  
What comes out is: “I’M IN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP!”

Then he vaults over the table, narrowly missing Reynir’s head with his boot, landing on the hood of a nearby vehicle and proceeds to bound from hood to hood in the parking lot until he’s disappeared in the maze of war machines. A few of the soldiers around let out exclamations of shock. A mechanic pops out from under one of the machines Emil jumped over and complains loudly about the boot-print they find on the shiny hood.   
The man stares at the place where Emil disappeared with his jaw hanging open. Tuuri takes advantage of the opportunity to admire some very nice white teeth, with the most adorable little gap between the first two. This man could be Mikkel’s age. Or Sigrun’s. Or possibly exactly between them.

“Did I say something wrong?” says the man, bewildered and a little crest-fallen.

Tuuri shakes her head “Our colleague is just a little skittish today. You’ll have to excuse him. He had a long day, you see.”

The man nods his perfect head, as if this clarifies everything “I don’t suppose either of you knows a Madsen?”

“Sure do,” says Reynir “We know eight of them. Which one do you want?”

Their new friend has to consider this for a moment “Eight Madsens? I didn’t know there were so many of them.”

“If we’re talking about the same Madsens then, yeah, there sure are a bunch. We are talking about the Danish Madsens? With the farm and the blond hair?”

The man nods at Tuuri. Tuuri tries not to let herself be too pleased by this act of mere validation. It is silly. But man, is it satisfying to be acknowledged by someone so ridiculously attractive.  
“Which one are you after? I know there are two of them around at the moment.”

“Uh, Mikkel.”

Reynir has to wonder what this guy wants with Mikkel. It occurs to him that it might be an old boyfriend- Mikkel has a few of those, and old girlfriends too, but not that many. He dismisses this possibility with a little smile. Mikkel isn’t bad looking. He’s clever ( a bit too clever for his own good) and fun to be around, but there’s no way he could have ever landed a guy that looks like a couple of beauty gods got together on a boring weekend and created the world’s most perfect man to ease the dullness.  
Probably no way.

“Good luck with that.” says a voice behind the man.

It’s Lalli. Materialising out of the thin air the way scouts tend to. He gives the man a searching look, up and down, then goes to stand behind his cousin. He puts a hand on her shoulder. The message is received: ‘Don’t embarrass yourself, Tuuri, just because he’s hot’.  
Received, certainly, but Tuuri doesn’t care to listen to this particular message.

The man looks a Lalli for a moment. Recognition: “Aren’t you one of the Hotakainens?”

“Yes.” he gestures down at his cousin “This is the other one. You’re looking for a Madsen.”

“Why did you say ‘good luck with that’?”

“No one knows where the Madsens are right now. The twins. Mikkela and Mikkel.”

He winces slightly as he says the names. Lalli still cannot get over how stupid the Madsen parents would have had to be to name their twins like that. 

The man is troubled by the news that his apparent quarry, Mikkel, is not within arm’s reach “Really? I was assured that they are here.”

“They are. Probably just plotting some evil.” says Tuuri.

“Evil? They still get up to that?”

“I don’t know if they ever do anything else.” Reynir squints suspiciously at the man. Suddenly, he mistrusts everything about him and wants to defend Mikkel from any contact with him “Can I ask, how do you know them?”

A small smile spreads over the man’s face. His teeth are startlingly perfect. The sheer, ivory whiteness of them is actually painful for Lalli to observe, and he is forced to shield his eyes against the sheen coming off of them.  
“Mikkel and I were…we were very good friends.”

“Boyfriends?” purrs Tuuri “Really?”

“Boyfriend.” repeats Lalli “Where’s mine?”

“Oh, he freaked out and ran over the hoods of the cars,” Reynir points “He’s probably hiding under one of them.”

Lalli pats Reynir on the head in thanks and hops leisurely up onto the first car, striding across the hoods as easily as anyone else would walk a bridge. He ignores the indignant bulging of the mechanics dodging his boots.

Tuuri, sensing the man is about to start asking the standard questions that people ask when they meet Lalli (“Does he always look like he just killed somebody?”; “I heard he doesn’t actually breathe. Is that true?” ; “Are you sure he’s actually a human?”), draws the attention back to the matter at hand. She flutters her eyelashes as she does, hoping her pleasant grey eyes will distract from the oil-encrusted state of her fingernails. 

“So, you and Mikkel dated then?”

“Yes, for a while.”

Tuuri mentally curses Mikkel for not marrying this one. To think she could have met this man as Mikkel’s husband and had the chance to stare at him every time he came around to do something husband-y for Mikkel, like dropping off a coat he forgot or whatever it is spouses do for each other.

Reynir, on the other hand, is scanning the crowd over the man’s shoulder. He is relieved when he spots Sigrun’s unmistakable stride cutting through the mob of people, who have begun to clot around the benches and cars nearby to get some good looks in at the man. Mikkel is beside her- no, wait, breasts, softer chin, longer hair. That’s Mikkela. He thinks.  
Reynir is about to lift his hand in greeting when Sigrun stops in her tracks, so swiftly that Mikkela bumps into her. Her jaw drops. 

Reynir looks down at himself, thinking he must have a spider crawling up his chest. As such, he almost misses it when Sigrun peels the top off a barrel, hops inside, and slams the lid down on top of herself. He watches in disbelief as Mikkela pokes at the barrel. She would appear to be attempting to summon Sigrun from the splintery depths of her make-shift fort. Sigrun makes no response.

He wants to report this extraordinary weirdness to Tuuri, but she is too busy charming the man and distracting attention from the oil on her fingers to pay attention to his subtle yanking on her sleeve, to him kicking her in the ankles under the table.

It is only when Mikkela marches up to the man’s side and taps him on the shoulder that Tuuri’s concentration is broken.

She turns to him, livid “What?” she whispers harshly.

“Sigrun’s in a barrel.”

“You what?”

He gestures at the barrel in question “Sigrun hid in a barrel.”

“Why are you worried? She does weird things all the time.”

“Yeah but normally that’d be like making armour out of the barrel.”

“Shush Reynir. I’m busy.”

But now the man’s attention has been claimed by Mikkela.

“Farouk,” she says, the dismay barely concealed in her voice “I thought you were in Denmark on that Cleansing effort.”

He is actually pleased to see her “Mikkela! How are you? It’s been a long time.”

She nods stiffly “Not since we were nineteen, correct?”

Though he is normally a bit dense with these things, Reynir grasps the subtext immediately.  
Mikkel’s old boyfriend. Mikkel’s sudden disappearance. Mikkela’s distaste.

The relationship did not end well.

Reynir gets up and slinks around the two of them. Neither of them notice he is leaving. None of the slowly assembling crowd pay much mind to him ducking through them to reach the barrel. Reynir stops a moment to consider it and hears, quite distinctly, Sigrun say: “…cold feet on my back every single time we shared a bed! Even when he was wearing socks!”

“You’d think his feet would have become less lizard-like after five years.” says a deep voice that is unmistakably Mikkel.

Reynir raps smartly on top of the barrel. They fall silent in an instant.

“Are you both in the barrel?”

Sigrun sighs “It’s just Reynir. We’re safe.”

“How are you both fitting in there?”

“Not comfortably.” says Mikkel “Sigrun’s joints seem to have doubled in number and every single one of them is buried in some fleshy patch of mine.”

“Ah, quit whining. Just be glad I didn’t kick you out!”

“Hold on. Explain this to me. Why are you both in the barrel?”

“See that amazingly hot guy over there with the perfect teeth?” says Sigrun.

Reynir glances over his shoulder. The guy, apparently Farouk, is still talking to Mikkela, whose hand is behind her back and clutching at the hilt of the dagger that is tied to the back of her belt. Tuuri is still fawning, oblivious of the danger, or of Reynir’s disappearance.

“Yes.”

“Old boyfriend.” says Mikkel “Bad old boyfriend. Lots of emotional manipulation. Tell me, has my sister found him yet?”

“’Kela? Yeah, she looks like she might stab him.”

He can hear the smug smirk in Mikkel’s voice “Oh wouldn’t that be a crying shame.”

“Wait, if he’s just Mikkel’s old boyfriend then why are you-”

“We didn’t say that!” retorts Sigrun “He’s my bad old boyfriend too! We dated when I was, like, twenty-four. He was a year older than me. Beautiful. Exotic, by virtue of being Danish-”

“Danes are not exotic.”

“Yeah well Dalsnes can be a bit backwoods sometimes, alright? And the whole attitude down there is ‘any port in a storm’. So you better believe when a new port opens up, I’m gonna go check it out.”

“Wait, wait, you both dated that guy? That perfect one? Over there?” Reynir cannot quite reconcile the perfection over there talking to Tuuri and Mikkela with the two people in the barrel- cynical, slightly evil Mikkel, and bellowing, semi-psychotic Sigrun.  
Besides, emotional manipulation? Doesn’t seem like something Sigrun would put up with at all. Seems like something which would result in one of Sigrun’s weathered war-boots being planted up the rear of her emotional tormentor.

“Yes.” they say in unison.

“And you’re both hiding from him?”

“Why else would I be in a barrel?” says Mikkel.

“Damn straight, kiddo!” says Sigrun “Can you do us a favour? Let us know when he leaves? Mikkel and I have plans. Plans that may or may not entail camping in the wilds until he leaves the country. Or, like, maybe just dies?”

“That sounds good.” says Mikkel.

Reynir nods, then realises they cannot see him nodding, and says “Alright. I’ll let you guys know. Do…do you want a glass of water or anything?”

“No.”

“We’re fine.”

“But you’re a champ for asking. Now scoot. Scat. Get outta here. He’ll get suspicious.”

Reynir scoots, leaving Sigrun and Mikkel in the barrel to compare notes on their shared ex.   
Maybe it is not so bad that he hasn’t really had a stead relationship since that summer in Iceland, when he was seventeen and that young farmhand over the road was irresistible? Or, wait, can he count that thing with the weirdo at the academy? The girl who was convinced they were soulmates after ten minutes of knowing each other, and Reynir just kind of went along with it because he was lonely and maybe, also, just possibly, because she looked a little bit like Tuuri?

Tuuri. He better go rescue her from that guy or from the scene Mikkela seems inches away from causing, if her grip on the knife is anything to go by.   
And maybe tell her about that girl from the mage academy. About how nice it was to be with someone that looked a little bit like her. Maybe. Probably not. Probably just bite down on his confessions of love as usual and go cry in a hole for a while.

Yeah, that second option is really speaking to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wouldn't it be weird, though, if Mikkel and Sigrun had links that they didn't even know about, like sharing a needy ex boyfriend that made them feel slightly weird and like awful people until they had the epiphany that they didn't need his stupid butt in their lives and kicked him to the curb?  
> Or maybe I'm going slightly delusional because I love this brotp so much.


	54. 83: Heal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reynir is very magical

Reynir is told that all people with red hair can do it. 

“Then how come I’ve never seen you do it before?” retorts Reynir, shortly after his father had finished telling him. This touch of scepticism comes from being the youngest of five. He has realised that his siblings tell him porkers all the time for the fun of it, and this realisation disillusioned Reynir to the extent that he feels the need to question everything.  
To the relief of his parents, this turns out to be a phase.

Reynir’s father is stumped. He shoots a pleading look at Reynir’s mother, who leaps in with the explanation.

“Your father didn’t mean ALL people with red hair can use their hair in such a way. He meant most. His grandfather could do it- couldn’t he, dear?”

Reynir’s father bobs his head in confirmation “Certainly could. But here’s the thing. You can’t tell anyone about being able to…to do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because- because it would make the others jealous! Not many people around here have red hair, do they?”

“Well, no, but what about the people that do-”

“None of them can do it. We’re kind of short on the ability in this part of Iceland, son, so don’t go around talking about it or people will get jealous of you. Jealousy breeds hatred.”

“Oh.” Reynir is crestfallen “I thought it was really cool.”

His mother pats him uncertainly on the head. She wants to heal the wounds she and her husband have just inflicted on their child, but cannot think of a way to both repair him and conceal the truth from him. She would far rather her baby has a few scars from insecurities than gets any dangerous ideas. In fact, the last thing she wants for her baby is for him to get any dangerous ideas.

“There, there, it will be alright. Now be a dear and go fetch your sister some water. She could probably do with some.”

When Reynir pads off, his head hanging, his parents exchange a frantic look. What are they going to do about this?

 

Though his parents have told him not to use his special ability since Reynir discovered it, again, for fear of seeding jealousy among the rest of the untalented red-haired population of their town, Reynir has made a habit of healing.

It is a simple enough procedure. Reynir will cut his palm open on a rock as he dashes after a sheep that is determined to get itself stuck up a craggy hill and, once the rogue sheep is safely restored to the flock, Reynir will spare himself a week or so of fierce stinging each time he uses the injured hand. He unfurls a sheaf of hair from his braid and wraps it around the wound, waits patiently for about five minutes, then peels the hair off an unwounded hand.  
He washes the blood from his hand and his hair and says nothing about it to his parents when he returns for the day. If they wonder why their son does not return with a catalogue of scrapes and complaints like other shepherds, then they do not question him.

One afternoon, when he is free of his sheep while his father and sisters tackle the task of shearing (which he is consistently useless at, in spite of earnest efforts to train and be trained), Reynir takes a walk to clear his head. He does not take much notice of the environment. Reynir pretty much knows where he is going. The landscape does not change all that much day to day, and he knows this land like the back of his hand from having walked it so many times in a cloud of sheep.  
What Reynir fails to notice is the new cave, freshly gaping, littered at the bottom with splinters of the thin rock flakes which finally caved to create it. He cannot really be blamed. The cave is accessed by a small hole in the earth which is screened by grass.

It is not really his fault when the earth falls out from under his feet and swallows him up into a short, sharp, black drop. Reynir hears something crack over his own scream. For a long time, his entire body hurts too much to figure out what has happened.  
When he does figure it up and he does gather the strength to move, Reynir props himself up on his elbows and takes a look around himself. He is in a small and shallow pocket of rock. Water drips above his head, forming a sizeable stream running to the left of him. It is a stroke of luck that he did not fall into the stream. The cold might have robbed him completely of his senses. He would have succumbed to temperature of the icy water, pouring straight from the heart of the underground, long before anyone would come along and find him.

It is only when Reynir tries to stand that he notices his leg has been impaled on a spire of rock. Not a large one. A very small one which has gone in the back of his calf and come out the other side. A slim white stick (bone, it’s a bone) has been shunted out to the side of the wound, as if the rock knocked it from its position. Reminds Reynir of a broom about to fall over.

Reynir stares. He wonders why he does not feel any pain. He wonders why his hands are shaking so badly that he can barely take the knife from his belt and wrestle a piece of hair from the braid. He wonders, at last, with a deep and steadying breath to fortify him, whether or not his inherent abilities will be enough to finish this wound off.  
He has never had to heal anything this large. He has never really considered the fact that he is mortal.

The process of getting his leg off the spire is also the point at which the pain begins. Placing his collar between his teeth, Reynir grabs his leg by the rim of his boot and the sleeve of his trousers and wrenches up with all his strength. The rock slides from his flesh as a knife would pass through cheese.   
Reynir screams. Reynir doubles up on his side, his injured leg out at an awkward angle, and presses his face to the cool rock floor. His screams dwindle to animal whimpers that he cannot quite believe are coming from him. He lifts his head, his eyes wet, and looks at the hole in his leg. He can actually see just the tiniest chink of the black cave through the layers of fat and tissue and red, red muscle. The bone is still stands to attention.

Reynir takes the loosened sheaf of hair and cuts it off with his knife. He drops the knife and winds the hair around two fists, then wraps the hair around the wound.

“Yep,” he hears himself say “That really fucking hurts.”

Has he ever sworn aloud before? He is fifteen years old and does not know whether he has ever sworn before. He is fifteen years old, at the bottom of a cave with a wound that could very well be fatal if it decides it wants to be.  
Reynir doesn’t want to die.

Thankfully, he does not. The hair does its job. Within moments of the blood beginning to seep through, red on red, the flow of blood stops. Not slowly, but entirely. One minute Reynir can literally feel the warmth coursing out of him into the frozen depths around. The next he can feel his body has been stopped up like a cork being pushed back into an over-turned bottle.

There is a disconcerting, rubbery snapping sound inside his leg, which is his bone painlessly reconnecting. There is a wet sound like a sheep chewing cud, which must be the outermost layer of his tissues sealing themselves up. The pain is gone at once.  
It takes five more minutes for Reynir to gather up the courage to take a look. He casts the hair to the side, to float off wherever the stream is headed, and cups some water to wash away the worst of the bloodstain. His skin is clean and unmarked.

Another five minutes pass in a silent, weeping heap on the stone. Just getting it out of his system. 

Reynir makes it home by nightfall. The top of the cave was reached with much cursing and struggling and a little bit more crying. Before he walks through the door, he discards his bloodied and torn trousers in a nearby bush, trusting the winds to blow them a safe distance from the house by the tomorrow.   
He walks in on his father and sisters unwinding from a long day of shearing.

“What happened to you?” asks his older sister, concerned by the lack of trousers.

“Hare stole my trousers.”

“That happened to me once.” says his eldest sister “It got my jacket too. Gotta watch those tricky things.”

And that was that.

 

Five years later, Reynir scoots a little closer to Sigrun. Mikkel has just taken off her bandages. With the gashes exposed to the open air, Reynir is struck at the same time by a wave of guilt and nausea. That could have so easily been his spine or his face if Sigrun had not thrown herself in front of him.  
Sigrun is not at all concerned by her injury; she talks casually over her shoulder to Emil, who is trying to get Lalli out of the snowbank that he just face-planted into. Long day of scouting, Reynir thinks, but he is glad that Lalli is not conscious to witness what Reynir is about to try.

“Watch her,” says Mikkel “I’m going to get another roll of bandages. If a troll comes into the clearing or something like that, I want you to push her down at sit on her. Do not let her go near one of thoe hideous things with open wounds.”

Reynir nods “I’ll take good care of her.”

As soon as Mikkel’s back is to him Reynir snatches the gauze scissors from the cloth where Mikkel laid his medical instruments, and cuts off a piece of the end of his braid. Sigrun watches him do this with an eyebrow cocked. She has no idea what she’s looking at, but she isn’t perturbed, even when Reynir wraps his hair around her wounds as quick as he can.

Mikkel comes out in time to see Reynir finishing this.

“What are you doing?” he asks not unkindly.

“Magic? I think.”

“Ah. Well, I hope that magic there doesn’t infect her arm.”

Sigrun says something to Mikkel. She sounds confused, but not angry. Thank the gods she does not sound angry.  
Emil comes over to look at what Reynir has done. He gives him a quizzical look, but says nothing. Emil is too concentrated on keeping Lalli from slipping off his shoulder (slung over it like a sack of farmer’s grain on the way to market) to try miming a question.

Mikkel draws closer. Reynir knows the moment Mikkel gets within arm’s reach he is going to take the hair off- he is a pretty tolerant guy as far as people go, but he isn’t going to risk the captain’s health to indulge whatever little weird ritual Reynir is trying.

Reynir gets there faster. He slices the hair away carefully with the same scissors, then scoops up some snow and rubs away a fine layer of dried blood. His heart soars when he sees Sigrun’s arm is clean and unmarked.

Emil makes a noise not unlike a surprised horse. Sigrun makes a noise that reminds Reynir of a thunderclap, if thunderclaps could be impressed and overjoyed.

She shouts Mikkel’s name and says something in rapid-fire Norwegian, brandishing her healed arm. Emil stares at Reynir like he has just fallen out of the sky with a note pinned to him that reads ‘If found, please return to Asgard’.  
Reynir buries his face in his hands in embarrassment.

He cannot believe he ever believed his parents about that red-haired-healing ability bull. He is such an idiot. It has taken him this long to summon up the courage to try again- to thank Sigrun in the only way he knows how. The only way that does not involve hugging, at least. 

A shadow falls over him. Sigrun lifts his head from his hands and knocks her forehead against his, grinning.

She says something in her own language. He does not need to ask Mikkel to know she is thanking him.

“You’re welcome.” says Reynir “Thank you for saving my life.”

 

“Magic is real?” sputters Emil to Mikkel “What? But- he just- what in the holy Hel just happened? Did he just- he just healed her with hair! With HAIR.”

Mikkel shrugs “I didn’t see that coming either.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It wasn't until I finished this prompt that I realised the same thing happens in Tangled.


	55. 93: Give up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In spite of appearances, Sigrun has always maintained a certain emotional distance between herself and whatever comrades she might have. Apparently she can no longer maintain that distance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun and her (platonic, semi-predatory, like 'I am the defender of this nest and these are my eggs') love for her team-mates is close to my favourite thing in this fandom.

It is one of the first thing she learned in her training.

“Don’t get too attached, Siggy, because everything dies.”

The first time her Uncle Trond told her this, she was eight years old and bringing home a squirrel with a broken leg. She ignored him completely, as she was apt to do, and had her father splint the leg. The squirrel healed. It left. Sigrun did not consider herself all that attached to the rodent she kept in a box near the window (so it could look at the outside world, as a promise that Sigrun fully intended to return it to the real world) because she had brought it home with the intention to let it go.   
It was like a contract. The squirrel had busted something, and it was Sigrun’s responsibility, as the person who had found the poor thing, to take it home and splint the leg, then let it go. It was just basic decency.

The next time she heard it was also the first time she went out on patrol. Fourteen years old, already six feet tall and so full of nervous energy she could barely control the directions in which her coltish legs were going. Her uncle pulled her to the side, dismayed by his niece’s lanky and failing limbs, and whispered the same thing.  
“Don’t get too attached, Sig, because everything dies.” He had long since stopped calling her Siggy. Everyone stopped calling her Siggy as soon as she killed her first troll. She missed the nickname.

Trond turned out to be right; it was an unusually active day on which Sigrun had her initiation. Something like sixteen trolls blundered into her patrol on the way back home, when guards were lowered and the initiates were just starting to feel at ease among their seniors. The first one to die, a woman named Ylva who had trained Sigrun in basic self-defence since she was ten, was right next to Sigrun. A hot whip of her blood splashed across Sigrun’s face.   
Sigrun spent most of that battle rooted to the same spot. As soldiers and trolls raged around her, screaming, dying, fighting, spattering her with more blood, her uncle’s words echoed in her head. At some point she lifted her head and found herself standing in a battlefield. Three more were dead at her feet and a dozen more injured. She snapped out of her fugue long enough to carry a fellow initiate back to Dalsnes (from that day, known as One-Armed Dagmar), then crawled under her bed and cried for two days.

Uncle Trond was right.

Over the years, Sigrun put his teaching into practice. She was happy to smile at a new time and laugh with them and tell them stories, but that was it. She did not let herself like any of them. Not properly. She did not let herself feel sadness when one of them was inevitably killed. She had not let herself know them well enough to feel a sadness for their passing.  
For the most part it worked. There would be the odd soldier that told a joke too good to resist, or the novice who was so charmingly inexperienced and scared that Sigrun couldn’t help but like them for it, of the scout who was so hilariously mad to be forced to spend time in the company of other humans that Sigrun couldn’t help but want to bother them. 

But they were rare. Maybe four or five of them across a career that was now reaching into decades. And she was comfortable with it. Trond’s words had proved themselves accurate over and over and over again, and Sigrun didn’t mind a bit of loneliness at the expense of not feeling each and every single one of those deaths like a blow to the gut. 

 

At least, she used to work like that. Now she has found herself in the tricky position of being trapped in a very small, very tight space with the exact variety of people she cannot help but like.  
Emil, his competence and inexperience waging brief and funny wars with each other until he either hits his target dead-on or trips over his own feet. Lalli, hating everyone and everything, from the sun for having the audacity to rise and force him into another day, to his team-mates for daring to share his atmosphere.   
Mikkel, and his unrelentingly sardonic view of the world and terrible stitches. Sigrun is afraid he might actually be best friend material. When was the last time she had one of those? At sixteen, probably, and she seems to remember they also died horribly. Great.

Tuuri reminds her of a younger version of herself. Perhaps if young Sigrun liked to read and was so cuddly to even look at her was like an invitation to come and squeeze those inviting rolls into a big hug. And Reynir reminds her of that squirrel she brought home once- forever poised at the window, ready to take on the world, but in absolutely no condition to do so.  
She vacillates between wanting to swaddle him in a blanket and carry him around like a child, to wanting to scream at him for his idiocy: “WHY, you adorable fluffy thing, WHY did you think you were ready for the real world?!”

The morning Sigrun knows she has lost her battle is when she misses a pot-shot. Out on patrol with her favourite novice and her favourite scout. They hang back, letting her ford into the Silent World ahead of them. Emil steps where her feet have punched into the snow to accommodate his unfortunate tendency to trip over himself when trying to wade through deep snow. Lalli walks in stride with him and looks almost as if he is gliding over the snow, rather than pushing through it like the rest of the mortals.

A troll’s shadow falls over the cracked country path ahead. As the thing waddles its girth out of what looks like a derelict gas-station, Sigrun aims her rifle and shoots. She misses. Her arm is killing her today. Recently healed, but still might as well be in the sling for all the use she’s getting from it.  
She is about to take aim again when she feels a slim arm slide around her shoulder, and a hand grip her wrist.  
Lalli has materialised out of nowhere, as per usual, and is correcting her aim for her.

She fires again without a word. Down goes the troll; a perfect shot to the head. 

“Thanks, kid.” she pats him briskly on the shoulder. He seems to prefer this to her customary good-spirited wallops on the back.

He nods and retreats to help Emil, who seems to have lost a boot in a snow drift.

“Dammit,” mutters Sigrun to no one in particular “Dammit, dammit, dammit. I love them all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special shout-out to my man Trond for accidentally handing your niece crippling emotional issues about cultivating relationships in a post-apocalypse. You the man, Trond.


	56. 57: Sacrifice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli makes a sacrifice for Emil. It might not be enough to save him. It might just kill them both. But he has to try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heavy on the Emil/Lalli here. Some chop-changing of perspectives. Guest starring Sleipnirnoid. My thoughts on how the ghostly threat stalking our happy band could be revealed.
> 
> (Also, please ignore the geological impossibility of anything steep existing in Denmark. I am sorry. Artistic licence was shamelessly taken)

When he sees it, Lalli knows straight away who it is. 

In his early teens, Lalli was relentlessly stalked by a seal made out of golden light that no one else could see. Not even the mages. Not even Onni,. When he had finally had his fill of this ridiculously happy animal following him, he jumped up on the kitchen table and pointed to the seal, sitting on the ceiling, and shouted “AM I SERIOUSLY THE ONLY ONE THAT SEES THIS GODS-DAMNED BLUBBER TUBE ON THE CEILING?!”

Onni saw it too. After it was pointed out to him. Tuuri excused herself once she realised they were discussing mage’s business. She did not hold much with mage’s business.

“That’s Tuuri. Don’t call her a blubber tube.”

“That is not Tuuri. That is some kind of mystical seal monster. It’s been stalking me all over town for a week.”

Onni made him get off the table “No, it’s Tuuri’s luonto. That’s what a mortal luonto looks like. You can tell them apart from ours because of the colour. They don’t have much in the way of magic or presence, they’re just kind of a spiritual echo.”

Lalli regarded the seal warily “Well why is it following me?”

“Tuuri has been worried about you this week. It…it is the first time you’ve seen a troll since we left Mikkeli. I mean, being attacked on your second scouting trip alone? She’s worried, Lalli, she’s worried about you’re handling this because you don’t talk about it when you’re…you know. Her luonto is probably following you because she wants to make sure you’re alright.”

He stood abruptly “I’m fine. I don’t need her stupid seal following me.”  
He left the room without another word- except for the groan of disbelief and frustration when the seal scooted across the ceiling to follow him.

Since then, he has seen the seal about five times. Three times because he was out on his own in the Silent World and that freaked Tuuri out. The other two times the seal held a kind of vigil as he lay sick in his bed. Lalli has come to accept its presence- her presence. He almost wishes she, the seal, was around more often.

But it is not Tuuri’s luonto who has found him in the woods. It is someone else entirely.

He extends a cautious hand forward, towards the stag’s rippling and golden flank “What are you doing out here? Go back to the tank. Go back to your body.”

The stag gives him this look like ‘what, do you think I’m some kind of delicate flower?’

“Frankly? Sometimes I do. Sometimes you burn two-story trolls without batting an eyelid. Sometimes you scream when you step in mud and the squelch surprises you. I don’t know what you are.”

Talking to another person’s luonto is weird. He has only ever talked to Onni’s, and that was when Onni was piloting it so the owl (who Lalli has nicknamed ‘Hootakainen’ in his head) was just Onni talking through a beak. It is infinitely stranger to talk to a luonto when the person connected to it is not aware of being engaged in conversation.

Still, it is just like talking to Emil. Or what Lalli imagines that will be like, assuming they will ever have a common language. Comfortable. 

This is quite obviously Emil’s luonto. For one thing, the gold pelt is the same colour as Emil’s hair. For another thing, the look in the stag’s eyes is also Emil’s. In equal parts curious and bewildered. The eyes of someone just getting to know a world they thought they already knew, who is both pleased and terrified by what he is finding.

“What’s wrong?”

The stag doesn’t say a word, of course, but swings its heavy head in the direction which Lalli has come from. Dread knots in his stomach and settles at the bottom. His limbs seem to grow heavier.

“What’s coming?”

No response. No acknowledgement that he spoke at all. 

Lalli turns and starts to run. The stag keeps pace with him easily, of course, since it is made of nothing but golden light and spiritual echoes. Its legs and hooves blur as it runs into a sort of fine, gold steam that engulfs the lower half of its legs. Its height is incredible- but the antlers pass through the branches overhead with a whisper like a fire going out, where they should catch instead.  
He should have guessed. He can tell it now by the way the stag urges him on silently, picking up the pace every few steps to spur him into putting on another spurt of speed. Whatever the stag came to warn him about is not an impending doom. It has already fallen upon the camp and his team. His cousin.

Why didn’t the seal come to him? Tuuri’s seal knows him and has followed him happily enough before.  
No. Tuuri isn’t dead. He would know. He has known every other time when a member of his family expires. Mages do not miss something like a death in the family, whether that bond is blood or earned. They feel it as their own deaths. Lalli does not feel dead, so Tuuri must be alright. That does not rule out the others. He wouldn’t know. Not yet, but he can feel something like that link growing inside him like a weird fungus.

Lalli is not moving fast enough. 

“Help me,” he says inside himself “I’m not going to get there in time.”

A second later, he is no longer completely human. His luonto sinks into his limbs and makes them its own. Lalli moves and is not sure if he is even touching the ground anymore. The stag actually struggles to keep pace with him.  
The forest rushes on either side of them. He knows he is going straight over and under obstacles that he had to skirt earlier. 

There is a steep drop-off coming up ahead; on his way into the forest he had to scale it carefully. Now, on the way back and down the cliff he jumps without hesitation. For a moment, a good chunk of the forest is laid out at his feet. He sees the distant ribbon of smoke where the camp is.  
He sees the flash of the tank’s metal hull and something darkly grey compared to it and hunched over the front.

He thanks the gods inwardly. Tuuri is under the hood, checking on that confusing mess of innards. She’s fine.

And that is all he sees before he has caught the slim trunk of a tree in his hands and slides down to the forest floor again. If the stag didn’t fetch him for Tuuri, then the answer as to who it did catch him for is pretty obvious. Now that the initial panic that he would find Tuuri dead has subsided, he is calmer. Not by much, but by enough to allow himself to slow completely to a stop.

Lalli crouches, elbows on his knees, a dappled sunlight settling on his heaving back as he tries to catch his breath.  
The stag drives its muzzle into his back.

“I know.” he manages “Give me a second.”

The stag slips its head under his arm and pulls him upright, nudging him along gently and urgently. He might have been wrong. Whatever has scared the stag might not be upon his team already or the stag would be jabbing him with its antlers. The camp looked a tad too peaceful for imminent danger of death as well, which means that the threat is only on its way.  
It will get there. And it is bad enough that Emil’s luonto has sensed the danger, dull and inexperienced though its untrained and mortal senses are, and braved a ghost-infested wilderness to get the mage back. 

“Ease off.” he says to his luonto “Save it. There’s something else.”

Lalli sets off again at a lighter jog. After his sprint, his lungs are kind of on fire. It hurts to breathe. He’s fine with that. He is fine with any discomfort he might have to endure to get where the stag is leading him in time to prevent Emil or one of the others from dying.

The forest seems to grow darker. Concealing the threat from him with thickened shadows. Then there is a sudden, profound silence that tells of all the prey hiding from the monster, and their predators hiding in their own burrows while the alpha animal has its run of the woods. 

And in the midst of this is Emil. Lalli almost runs right past him and he would do exactly that if it were not for the stag stepping in front of him. He just barely manages not to crash into the luonto. Out of the corner of his eye, there’s Emil, with his jacket tied around his waist and his hair up and totally unaware of the danger he is in. Lalli can see that danger too.

Of course Emil wouldn’t be able to see it coming. Emil isn’t a mage. 

It’s a creature that might have once been a horse, but is now an eight-legged, vaguely horse-shaped thing trotting over to Emil in a way that might be friendly if it were not leaving a swathe of black rot through the snow it touches. Emil’s back is to the approaching ghost. 

Lalli urges his luonto forward. It does not move.  
The connection is there- its strong, its undamaged by their time apart, but the same is not necessarily true of their power. The physical manifestation took too much out of it to be useful now for anything but serving as company while Lalli watches this horse beast pull Emil’s soul out of his spine.

So Lalli does the only thing he can think of. In a few swift strides he has put himself between Emil and the ghost. No sooner than he has is the ghost’s muzzle entering his body like an ice-pick. He feels it bite inside of him. Looking for something to latch onto. But Lalli is not without his defences.

 

Emil doesn’t really know what’s going on. One moment he’s just investigating a strange noise in the forest that Sigrun ordered him to go check out (it was a rabbit stuck in a log which bit Emil twice as he pried it out of its woody prisons), and the next minute Lalli is basically on top of him, and he has the sensation of being plunged into an ice-bath. Or standing next to it.  
Like, if the fierce heat that radiates from a strong hearth was taken and reversed to be cold, that would be the sensation.

It would knock Emil off his feet except for his instinct to catch Lalli, who is already falling. Emil catches him and all at once he can see things he has never seen before and never wants to see again.

First is the vague shape of a horse, if the horse’s soul had been detached from its body and been left to rot and mutate in a dirty corner for ninety years. Which is probably exactly what happened. Emil hears it too- braying in what might be agony.  
It’s pulling something from Lalli. Or, rather, it is pulling away from Lalli as something silver and bright and angry smokes out of Lalli’s chest. The thing coming out of Lalli goes into the horse’s ghost via slits that must be nostrils, wriggling, squirming in ungracefully, and gaining each inch with a supreme effort, until it forces the jaws of the horse’s ghost apart with its back legs and slithers down its throat instead.

Through the thick, muddy light that the horse is made of the silver shines on through.

“What the Hel?” is all he can think to say.

He gathers Lalli up and scoots backwards rapidly, too afraid and shocked to stand. Lalli’s eyes are shut and racing underneath his lids. Emil folds an arm over Lalli’s chest and cups the other over Lalli’s eyes. He has the idea that he can’t let Lalli look at what is happening. Though that thing over there that is happening is definitely Lalli’s fault.

The horse whinnies and Emil realises he has heard a ghost scream before, and mistook it for wind whistling through the rafters of ruined buildings. A shiver shakes him from head to foot. What is happening? Why is this happening?  
And most importantly, why did Lalli just throw himself in front of Emil like that? Was that horse thing going to try to do to Emil what Lalli let it do to him?

If so, there is no way Emil would be able to fight back like Lalli is doing. White claws pierce the horse’s mottled pelt, rake down and peel back ribbons of the darkness. Over and over again until it looks like the horse is a cage for the animal Emil can now see inside it, in a spitting fury. Some kind of giant cat.

He looks down at Lalli “Of course you’d be a cat.”

As if in response, Lalli arches his back, his teeth gritted, a vein straining dangerously in his forehead. Emil catches his tiny wrists in one hand as the mage reaches up to claw at his own throat.  
“Don’t! You’ve almost got it!”

If Emil had a way to help that he knew would work, he’d jump in without hesitation. And no sooner has he finished this thought does the most gigantic stag he has ever seen whip out of literally nowhere and drive a set of antlers the size of Mikkel into the horse’s throat and pins it to the trunk of the tree- or what looks like the tree, a silver version of it, suddenly sagging inwards like a spider-web caving under the weight of dew.  
Except, you know, it’s the weight of a terrifying horse monster with an infuriated lynx or cougar inside of its ghost-ribs combined with a stag bigger than the tank. Emil wishes he had a hand spare to cover his own eyes.

Instead he just tries to keep Lalli from tearing out his own jugular as the stag punches its horns through the horse’s throat then, bracing itself on its back-legs, turns its head up and drags the horse up. Emil notices the horse has eight legs, all of which end in human hands or feet. These kick feebly at about the level of the stag’s chest.

He clutches Lalli closer to him “Oh gods.”

The stag does not quite seem to know what to do with the horse now that it has got it.

“Get rid of it!” urges Emil under his breath “Toss it!”

The stag does exactly that. Much to the lynx’s outrage, before it has a chance to climb out. Lalli’s nails start to dig into Emil’s arm. He ignores this.  
The horse goes sailing into the distance and slams into another tree. Again, the tree sags inwards in that spider-web manner, but this time it launches the horse back out. Mercifully, not back into the stag’s horns. It falls short of the stag, which charges over and starts to give its head a good stamping while the lynx claws the rest of the way out.

What little rags are left of the horse’s shape shivers and starts to dissolve into the snow. Wherever the wilting pieces of ghost touch the snow, the stuff first turns black and then melts into a tarry sludge that reminds Emil of the stuff that comes out of the tank’s exhaust.

The fight is over.

Emil buries his face in Lalli’s hair and tries to remember how to breathe.

He doesn’t move again until he hears a whimper.

“Lalli?”

Lalli cracks his eyes open. Wedges of slate in a face that has lost almost all its colour. His eyes focus on Emil with something like relief.

Emil knows Lalli won’t understand him, but he says it anyway “Thank whoever’s up there. I thought you were going to expire in my arms.”

Lalli sits up with Emil’s help. He is unable to stay up on his own, though, so Emil kind of collects Lalli to him and acts as a bolster.  
Without exchanging a word, they stare at the pool of blackened snow and grass where the horse’s ghost disappeared from. The lynx paws at the ground around the edges of the muck. Making sure its kill is well and truly killed. The stag is nowhere to be seen.

Lalli manages to lift his hand and make a beckoning gesture. The lynx’s head swings their way, and it lollops back, apparently rejuvenated by its tussle with whatever the spirit equivalent of death is. It goes in the same way it came out; in silver smoke. Lalli practically inflates the moment the lynx is back inside him.  
Emil can feel the strength return to him. He doesn’t let go, though, just in case.

Sigrun suddenly calls out in the distance. They both jump and clutch each other.

“Emil! Are you dead?”

“No!” his voice comes out in a squeak. He clears his throat and shouts “No! I’m fine! It was just a rabbit! I, uh, I found a weird rock! I’m just in here staring at a weird rock!”

This is mage’s business. Emil is not about to try to take control of the situation. If Lalli wants or needs anyone to know about it he will inform the rest of the team through Tuuri. Until then, not a word of it will pass Emil’s lips.

 

Lalli knows Emil won’t understand him, but he says it anyway “That was a scout. There are more on the way. It was maybe days ahead of the rest of them. We have time, but not much.”  
He just needs to say it out loud. He just needs to hear himself say it to believe the horror that is coming for him. The things the horse promised would follow it. Lalli is not going to be able to sleep comfortably for a long time.

The weird Swedish cogs in Emil’s brains translates this as ‘ok I think I can stand now’, so he wraps an arm around Lalli and helps him stand.  
Lalli is pretty sure his legs aren’t going to hold out all the way back to camp. But he is also pretty sure that Emil won’t let him fall, so that is fine by him. 

They start slowly back to the camp. Lalli has already set his beleaguered mind to the task of figuring out how to explain this to Onni, giving him all the relevant information while also omitting the part where Lalli dove in front of someone else and almost gave his soul to save someone he barely knows who is therefore, by Onni’s judgement, nowhere near worth the sacrifice.  
Lalli and Onni have been known to disagree in the past. If he tries to tell Lalli it was a bad choice to make, Lalli will have to tell him exactly where to stick his preconceptions of bad choices.

In the second he had between making the choice to jump in front of Emil and the much, much crueller choice of watching his friend die, Lalli realised there was no choice for him at all. He was moving to protect Emil before he was even aware that he intended to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dangit, Lalli, quit throwing your skinny self in between danger and your future husband. 
> 
> So this fic works of this terrifying little idea I had: what if the trolls intend to do the same to the crew as we've seen them do to Sleipnir? And then I my shipper's mind whispered 'Lalli protects Emil' and hey presto! Hope that wasn't too rambling and weird. 
> 
> I figure luontos would kind of go savage if their owners/source lost the time and ability to cast spells. Rather than waiting for orders or guidance the luontos would revert to the animal instincts that would keep humans alive in similar situations; the spiritual equivalent of adrenalin. Emil is momentarily able to see the spirits because, I don't know, his luonto is out along with his fierce desire to help Lalli (hence the reason Blonde Stag was able to gore things with his magnificent horns) and so the veil between mortal and magical reality is transparent?  
> Something like that.


	57. 17: Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir is almost home. He is also bleeding profusely and has no way to stop the flow of blood. Excellent timing.

The stress of it all is catching up with him all at once. 

And having to say his goodbyes didn’t help, though he knows they are all going to see each other next winter. The funding is a sure thing. The Council considered the mission a rousing success for all of the old world knowledge it brought back, and have insisted that each and every single one of the crew members comes back for the next round, next winter. This includes their stow-away.   
He’ll do a year’s training at the Icelandic mages’ academy in six months (a task he does not relish), spend two months training in Dalsnes with Sigrun’s outfit (by that time, he has promised himself, he will speak enough Swedish to know what Emil and Sigrun are saying), and the last four months will be spent in the tank again.

Reynir isn’t concerned about getting back into the tank.

What scares him the most is this part of the trip; coming home to his parents. 

He talked to them for the first time since leaving only a month before, using the tank’s radio. Sigurn had put in a request at the Norwegian embassy of Iceland to get the Árnasons up to use a radio at a certain time and date, and let Reynir make the long-overdue call.

The screech his father made when he realised he was talking to his son was so loud it scared both Lalli and the cat underneath the bunks and startled Tuuri so badly she tripped down the front steps. Needless to say, Reynir was so embarrassed he wanted to melt right then and there into the upholstery of the driver’s seat.  
He explained to his parents what he had done in pain-staking detail. He explained that he now knew he was a mage and was able to perform some basic magely tasks. He explained that, no, he could not come home right away because he was in the Silent World.

The sound his father made when he fell out of his seat was so loud Reynir fancied he could hear it without the aid of the radio- the crash carried all the way across the various waters and lands, from panicked father to his selfish son. He promised he would come home as soon as he could, then let Mikkel comfort his still-conscious mother a bit by assuring her he was in good hands- Sigrun Eide’s, to be exact, yes, that Eide. No not the grey-haired one. Her daughter. Yes. Yes the one who killed that Giant with her teeth last spring. No, no danger, she’s quite fond of him.

Since then he has only talked with them three times more. The last of those times was at the port in Norway just before his ship departed. Sigrun was there with him to say her goodbyes, though the only words they had in common between them were the curses he had picked up from her, and again, pulled some strings to get his parents on the radio.  
They were crying with relief at the news that he was coming home. Reynir managed not to cry while he talked to him. Then, when he turned to Sigrun, he saw the bitter, understanding smile on her face and cried on her shoulder for close to twenty minutes. She had to carry him up the gang-plank.

Hopefully he’ll be in a better state of affairs the next time they see each other.

Now he’s facing a different problem. Walking home from the station, a day earlier than the day he told his parents so they wouldn’t make a scene, and Reynir feels possibly the biggest, most gushing nosebleed he has ever had in his life is on its way. 

Reynir usually knows when one is coming. The stress, for instance, the stress will warn him. As it mounts, so will his certainty that one will come until he has finally talked his body into busting the thin veins inside his nose.

He’ll get a slight ache behind the temples. An itch inside his nose. A tremendous sense of doom and shame at the impending avalanche of embarrassment.  
He used to get nose-bleeds daily as a child. His parents were sure it was a sign of physical frailty and wanted to lock him up in the house all the time, away from the things which could hurt him. Reynir had to convince them that he wasn’t going to die the moment he set foot outside by proving it, sneaking out of the house again and again and again, and finding new ways to do so when his father actually nailed planks over his window.

He’s hesitant to claim the boost in confidence all of that sneaking out gave was the very thing which changed his nose-bleeds from a daily to a weekly, then monthly, then occasional occurrence, but it is probably true. He taught himself to deal with stress. Once he was more easily able to deal with stress he was also able to stop himself from bleeding all over everything.

The thing is, Reynir hasn’t been under this kind of stress since he was a young, young child, still convinced of the monsters under his bed and crammed into the closet with a sexuality that remains dubious (straight? Maybe if straight has a close cousin that looks a lot like it, that’s what Reynir’s sexuality is), which is surprising, given the amount of time he spent nearly dying over the last winter.

Honestly? He just wants to run back to the station, hop on the next ferry to Norway, and retreat to Dalsnes. Sigrun could find some use for him. Emil is there too, hammering out the dents in his military training with the Hotakainens (Onni included! They could bond over being mages together), so Reynir wouldn’t be alone.   
Or he could go to Bornholm, where Mikkel is checking in on his family to, in his words, make sure his mother hasn’t seduced another farmhand and his father hasn’t gone off into the Danish wilds to live as a hermit again. Also, to reunite with his brothers and sisters, who will all be coming back for a few weeks of vacation.

Maybe if Reynir dyed his hair blond and affected a Danish accent (on what? His Icelandic? No, that’s dumb), they would let him join the Madsen family for as long as it took for his parents to calm down.

Reynir sighs.

He really has no other option than to go home and hope for the best. 

His parents love him, so they will understand. They will not want to understand why he left them. Nor will they want to understand why he has decided to throw himself head-first into the danger they have tried to keep so far from him.  
But they will, in time, come to understand, because they love him and they know he loves them.

Reynir throws the door open. At the same time, the dam in his nose breaks and blood comes pouring down his front.

“I’m home!” he cries nasally, then adds, quietly, slightly pathetically “A day early.”

His father comes into the hall, incredulity written all over his face, which is then over-written by horror. His father swoons and falls backwards with another thunderous crash. Reynir winces.

“What is it dear? Another mouse?” calls his mother from another room. She apparently didn’t hear Reynir announce himself.

Reynir cups a hand over his nose in an earnest but futile effort to staunch the alarming flow of blood “Mom! Dad passed out again.”   
He wishes he could think of something more heart-felt and loving to say to his mother, after the agony he must have put her through this past winter, but all he can really focus on is his poor father spread out on the floor.

His mother strides into the hall and nearly trips over his father’s body. Her eyes find him and widen with shock, joy and horror.

“Hey Mom,” he says “I got home a day early. And kind of got an enormous nosebleed on the way home. Can I have something to mop this up with?”

Her eyes roll back into her head. Her knees buckle. Down she goes, slung across his father.

Reynir looks at the splayed bodies of his parents as blood drips through his fingers and thinks on how good it feels to get home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personal headcanon: in addition to getting a sunburn just by thinking about the sun, Reynir gets a lot of nosebleeds. It's due to his powers being made to stay latent at his parents' insistence for so long?


	58. 84: Out cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli goes exploring in the dream-scape of the Silent World. What he finds is not what he expects to find.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heavy on the Emil/Lalli. And I mean avalanche heavy.

Thanks in part to Reynir’s constant and grating presence in his haven, Lalli decides to do something he has not done for a long while and explore the dreamscape. He does not really like exploring the dreamscape. Scouting is a great thing to do while you are awake and conscious of all the threats to your health. Not so much when you are asleep and half conscious of the threats swimming in and out of the edge of your vision, churring, hissing, making these awful noises that sound like shellfish falling on the surface of a dock.  
Lalli just doesn’t really like it. A shame, though, because the landscape really can be sublime in the dreamscape. 

He is reminded of this as he goes walking in the dreams. With his haven shrinking in the distance, Lalli feels a little freer and can breathe easier than he has been able to for a long time in the dreams. It’s not that he hates Reynir; to his horror, Reynir is actually growing on him. It’s just that Lalli needs some of his own head-space. To think and only hear himself thinking, sans the unending stream of chatter Reynir tends to pour into one’s ear.  
He did leave Reynir a message. Spelled out in pebbles on the riverbank: ‘Went for a walk. Don’t try to follow or you will die’. He went as far to find a twig with which he underlined the ‘will’, so hopefully Reynir will just go back to his own haven. Then again the thought of Reynir just making himself at home in Lalli’s is no longer as disturbing as it once was.

Lalli picked a random direction and set out. The dreamscape tends to change. Sometimes according to the geology of the place he’s in. Sometimes according to who is close to him. In Keuruu, he could go to his left and right and find the same grassy, stream-worn grounds that he has in his haven, Tuuri sleeping in a grassy bed in one, and Onni pootling around his making nervous noises to himself like he did when he was awake.  
Now, he is not sure what he will find. Whatever it is will be a welcome change from the alarming flatness of Denmark. Lalli isn’t sure what weirdo nature gods had a hand in sculpting that landscape, but honestly, they had no imagination.

The terrain stays familiar for a while. Lalli hops a small stream and finds himself passing his cousin. The mortals will turn in their sleep. Their avatars in the dream world do not awake until they themselves are dead or having some kind of prophetic, spiritual experience. Tuuri is on her side with a hand pillowing her cheek and her legs folded on top of one another quite neatly. As per usual, she is surrounded by a cloud of heather and roses, and dressed in the apron, breeches and rough shirt he remembers she wore on the day their family died in Saimaa.  
Lalli pauses to extract the other crushed arm from underneath his cousin’s decent girth. He does not know if it is possible to get cramps in the dreamscape when one is not even capable of moving themselves through it. Better safe than sorry.

As he leaves the boundaries of her haven, he hears a bark at his back. Lalli turns and waves to the golden seal which rolls around the grass and occasionally through Tuuri’s body. When he turns forwards again he sees his luonto has joined him.  
Luonto and mage stride on into the dreamscape in a companionable silence. Lalli suspects his lynx can talk. They have just never felt the need to talk to him. They do not usually need words to understand what they want and need from each other.

The dreamscape melts from Tuuri’s ferny, gurgling clearing in the forest into a darker, brooding woods that reminds Lalli of the stuff he saw on the ferry to Sweden, during the brief moments he did not spend seasick or sleeping to escape his seasickness. These woods are filled with the crunching footsteps of spirits, passing like lanterns in between the trees, but never straying too close. There is the odd sound of something sick retching in the distance. Lalli pays these noises no mind. He has long since decided that he will not worry about the ghosts that haunt this part of the world unless they begin to worry about him and pester him.

They arrive at a sudden and steep drop into a sheer valley. A chasm, really, filled with trees that somehow managed to grow from the inky darkness beneath. Looks like a pit filled with green hands. Finger-tips groping for him in a wind that smells of Tuonela.

This time, he feels the need to make a comment to his luonto “Let’s not fall in that.”

Spanning the chasm is a sturdy set of stepping stones. Attached to nothing and suspended by nothing as far as Lalli can see, but they form a thick enough trail together. Lalli tests his weight on the closest stone. The stone does not bob or crack under him so he plants both feet squarely on the stone. And waits.  
And moves onto the next and the next until he has worked up a smooth rhythm. Not having his stomach for heights, the lynx turns their paws to smoke and floats along beside Lalli’s head.

He has no idea where he is going. Onni would have a heart attack- several heart attacks and a stroke on the side if he could see the silly way his little cousin was risking himself, and worse, for no good reason other than for this stuff called ‘headspace’! Lalli can almost hear Onni’s thunderous shouts calling him back to the other side, the safe side, and has to look back to make sure it isn’t true.

When he makes it to the other side, Lalli waits a moment to ensure the steps do not crumble in his wake. And when they do not he moves along.

This new terrain is all slopes. He looks upwards, and he’s looking at a mountainside, at trees stubbornly anchored again gravity with branches that bow towards him and needles that seem to blow in side-ways winds when they fall off. And downwards the ferny floor spills, like a waterfall, until it reaches the flat plateau of a field of wildflowers.  
Beautiful, obviously, and only made slightly unnerving by the songs of birds that he cannot see when he looks overhead at the canopy. Here the spirits are calm and grazing animals. Equine and flowing in shape, mild in behaviour when they do notice him.

A small, lithe creature made of red lights- the neutral colours between the magical silver and the mortal’s gold- bounds up to him and the lynx and sniffs them curiously, then rubs itself on Lalli’s legs. He has no idea what he is petting but it sure is damned cute. When the spirit has had its fill of humanity, it churrs what might be a goodbye in a musical voice and bounds off in good cheer. 

Again, Lalli feels the need to talk to his luonto. This is weird. They normally don’t talk at all, but then, these last few weeks have been very weird for him.  
“I wonder if they’ve never seen a human here. An awake one.”

They do not respond. Lalli does not even know what his lynx sounds like. He has always imagined they will sound something like him- a little peeved to be alive and to have to talk to other sentient things, like they just want to go back to bed and pretend the world does not exist until it is convenient for the world to exist. Say, when the lynx wants a drink of water or a biscuit or something.  
Reynir claims his luonto talks to him all the time. Lalli has yet to see the luonto utter anything that is not a bark, but if his loquacious owner is anything to go by, then that’s a good thing.

 

Lalli raises his arms over his head and stretches, then cracks his neck. He tilts his head back to look at the canopy again, for a sign of those hiding songbirds, and instead finds himself staring at a small, golden furry thing on one of the lower branches.

“Hello Lalli,” says the thing, which is Sigrun, going by the voice “What are you doing over here?”

He shrugs “Walking.”

“Exploring?”

“I guess. Are you asleep near here?”

“What, my body? Yeah around here somewhere. I don’t know. What luonto has time to keep track of their flesh-suit when it doesn’t even get used here? My body turns over maybe twice a year. You should see her now. On her belly, arms and legs spread-eagled. Looks like a sleeping drunk.”

As far as he can tell, what Lalli is talking to is a sable. They are very small, speaking from a little pointed face, staring at him with pinprick eyes while little curved ears flick this way and that at the forest noises.

“I had you pegged for a wolf.”

“Me? Nah, no way. Wolves are too showy. Too obvious. Sables? Now they look cute. And they are, oh man are they cute, right up until the little sucker bites your thumb off and runs back to its den to feed to its babies,” the sable stretches itself out proudly, up to its full height, which is about as high as Lalli’s forearm. 

“Hey, Lynx. How are things.” says the sable to the lynx.

The lynx blinks impassively up at them- at her- and begins to wash their front paws.

The sable lets out a very human snort “Quiet now that your human’s around? I get that. I gotcha. Well I gotta go, Lalli, Lynx. I have some very important stuff to do. Chase leaves. Dig some holes. Frolic. Maybe bother Bear.”

“Bear?” repeats Lalli quizzically.

“Sure! Bear! You haven’t met him yet? Mikkel’s luonto. Big as a house. I ain’t kidding. Has a hard time getting through these woods, he’s so big. Hey, if I see him, I’ll tell him you said hi. Now I gotta say bye. Bye Lalli, bye Lynx.”

The sable darts off up the trunk of the tree and hops into its neighbour. Lalli can hear tiny claws scrabbling at bark for about half a minute afterwards.

“So you can talk.” he says to his lynx.

Not for the first time Lalli wonders what Emil’s luonto looks like. He thinks he may have seen it in passing. He has certainly had some glimpses of a gold-furred creature which is not Tuuri’s blubbery luonto. Something huge, so possibly it is Mikkel’s bear he has been seeing.  
He did not know luontos had names for each other. Bear, Sable, Lynx, probably Dog…it must be Seal and Owl then, for his family, but what do luontos of the same shape call each other? Cat One and Cat Two?

The ground gradually grows less steep. The slopes give way to a flat forest floor over which a gigantic mountain looms. The top of the mountain is shrouded in fogs and clouds. Every now and then there is a distant boom of thunder, a faint flash of lightning and the taste of ozone blown to him on a warm wind. Lalli wonders vaguely if he is walking among the foothills of Asgard.  
Now small red herds drift through the trees. Mostly, they are shaped like elk and caribou. The spirits of the animals pay no mind to him, and he none to them. Only once does the massive and vague outline of a moose shamble up to him, probably thinking he is another spirit, and upon realising its mistake, lollop off in the most endearingly clumsy fashion Lalli has ever seen. He didn’t know moose spirits act as doofy in the spirit world as they do in the waking life, but it makes him very, very happy to know for some reason.

And he cannot help but think that if this were a Finnish forest, the place would be strewn with havens. A Finnish mage’s haven is generally marked out by a body of water; to gain entry, one has to step through or over the water. If the mage doesn’t want that person getting in then that person is getting doused, as Reynir learned, and probably will not get past the water at all.  
No streams here. Of course the Swedish do not have active mages. Onni figures there is plenty of latent magic floating around in the Swedish bloodlines, but because no one wants to try to use it or even acknowledge their old gods, it cannot be accessed. The same with the Danes. Onni has a lot of theories about magic and most of them make him sound like a crazy person.

Lalli is just smiling to himself at the thought of his raving cousin when he sees something strange out of the corner of his eye. What is that?  
Lalli walks a little closer cautiously. A mound rises out of the ground. Clearly unnatural in shape- someone has come and made this with time and effort and some finesse. Grass grows over it, lush and flowered, but as he circles the mound he can see there is a hole in the mound. A door? Through a thin curtain of ivy seeps the unmistakable buttery light of a torch burning.

He turns to his lynx. The lynx looks back at him with no particular alarm. In fact, it looks more eager to intrude than wary of the strange place. So Lalli pushes aside the screen of ivy and nearly falls back in shock.

“Emil.”

So the Swedes do sleep in the dreamscape.

Emil lays on his back on a slab in the centre of a small room. All around him, mounted on the walls and laid out neatly on the floor are weapons of all description, with the exception of anything modern. Broadswords and cross-bows and great shields. His hands are folded on his chest around the hilt of a sword that is almost half of his length, sheathed in gold and encrusted with jewels. He wears a shirt of deep blue and slightly darker breeches, underneath a long coat that looks like it may be made of a wolf’s skin. His hair is pulled back into a braid that is much longer than his hair in the waking world. Each ear has been pierced twice with little silver hoops. There’s a length of silver wire in his braid and some kind of small white crown encircling his forehead, and hunting boots on his feet, stained at the soles as if from the blood of his most recent kill.

If Lalli thought Emil was kind of cute before, then he is absolutely breath-taking here, dressed in the riches of an ancient prince and bathed in soft torch-light. 

“Gods almighty.” whispers Lalli.

He lets the curtain fall behind him.

“Emil? Can you hear me?”

Of course he can’t hear him. Emil is mortal. About as unmagical and mortal as it gets. What a shame to think this stunning spiritual projection is going to go untouched and wasted.  
Lalli steps carefully around the weapons on the floor. He has to see if Emil is solid. First, he lays a hand across Emil’s eyes to feel if they are moving under the lids. They are. So Emil is awake and totally unaware of the version of himself that lies in this place. This must be a burial mound or something. Lalli heard the Vikings would stick their dead in a boat and burn the boat, so what the Hel is Emil doing entombed in the earth with a small arsenal?

This makes no sense. And gods above, does Emil look good in that shade of blue. No- focus, and not on the beautiful Swede.

He examines the sword clasped in Emil’s leather-gloved hands. A good piece of work. Not decorative. Something that might be presented to a warrior king for battle, with the fancy sheath just to remind people that he’s the king and damned fancy because of it. It suits Emil ridiculously well.  
The finery is actually quite sparse- no jewellery beyond the earrings, and the crown is definitely a status symbol. He has no idea what that twine in his braid is. Spare hair-tie?

Lalli leans over the slab and puts his head to Emil’s chest. His heart-beat is there. Strong and clear.  
He holds a hand above Emil’s mouth and feels the tiniest whisper of breath against his palm. This form is fully alive and in very good health. 

“Emil,” he tries again “Can you hear me?”

Gods, what would it be like to talk to Emil and understand him? Different.

Try as he might to rouse him, Emil does not even stir. Not so much as a whimper in his sleep. This is a deep and unshakable sleep.  
At some point Lalli stops trying. He does not make any conscious decision to let Emil sleep in peace. His hands fall to his sides. He perches on the side of the slab and stares at his friend’s sleeping face. In here, as with the waking world, Emil sleeps with a troubled expression, as if his dreams are doing something he does not approve of. 

Lalli wishes he could wipe that frown away. Emil looks so much better when he smiles. 

“I wish to the gods you would wake up.” he says softly to the sleeping boy on the slab “You have no idea how much I wish that.”

He cannot stay in this place any longer. Not with Emil like this. So Lalli reaches up and smooths Emil’s glossy hair down until he reaches the base of the braid. He backs up slowly and carefully, and lowers the ivy curtain quietly, as if there is a danger that Emil might actually stir.

The lynx waits patiently outside for him.

“Well?” says the lynx in his own voice.

Lalli blinks “Well what?”

“Is it worth it to have seen what you can never have? Just to know it exists, that is.”

“You can stop talking now.”

The mage and the luonto depart in the same companionable silence they arrived in. They are each mourning something, though neither is quite sure of what it is they have lost. Or if it is lost at all. Just that it is unavailable.  
As they walk, Lalli feels the familiar weightiness returning to his limbs that tells him his physical body is about to wake up. When he next opens his eyes in this world he will do so from the safety of his own haven again. He does not know if he wants to come looking here to find Emil again. He does not know if he has it in him to stare at Emil prostrated like that. Almost dead.

With the weight of sleep grasping him firmly now, Lalli sits with his back to a trunk. He lifts his arm. The lynx settles under his arm and pushes their head into Lalli’s chest. They purr. Closing his eyes, Lalli puts his head to the trunk and hopes he will not remember any of this when he wakes.

The curtain of ivy over the mound shifts. Emil emerges, squinting, tired and bewildered by his clothes and the sword he still has in one hand. The relief on his face when he sees his friend just a few trees over is almost heart-breaking

“Lal-” he starts.

Lalli and the silver thing under his arm snap out of existence.

“-li.” finishes Emil.

He stares. He is not sure if he just saw what he thinks he saw.

“Huh.” says Emil after a moment “Um…ok…alright.” he looks down at the sword, as if there might be a hint to solving his conundrum in the jewelled pommel “Ok, I’m confused. I’m very confused.”

There is no response. Neither from the woods, the mound, nor the tree Lalli lay under only seconds before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Emil is in a barrow like some Saxon king. Lalli just gets a raft. Unfair! And, gasp, could Emil possibly be just the tiniest bit magical? Maybe? Wow!
> 
> (This is just me trying out an idea I might develop into a fully blown fic later on)


	59. 35: Hold my hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun's aversion to painkillers is not necessarily ideological, as the crew are about to learn the hard way.

“Mikkel,” says Sigrun slowly “Did you ever think about the fact that we’re all made of meat? Like, just meat. Not even well-packaged meat. Stuff gets inside us and infects the crap out of us all the time. And we go rotten too. We’re like sub-par meat. The stuff you feed to the dogs, you know? Not the stuff that goes to market.”

Mikkel is talking into the radio and doing his best to ignore her “…in short, this is the most severe reaction I have ever seen to painkillers. I thought her aversion to them was ideological. ‘I’m a Viking I have no need of your medicines puny Dane’ and all that.”

Trond’s crotchety voice crackles out of the speakers “This should have been included on her medical file. Sigrun has extreme, near psychotic reactions to high dosages of painkillers. She knows her limits…I hesitate to ask this, but did you by any chance drug her?”

“And we have emotions,” continues Sigrun “So really, we’re just sad meat. Sad steaks. Mikkel, we’re all sad steaks.”

“Of course not! I would never do that. I’m a medical professional, not a mad scientist!”   
Part of this is a fib, but Mikkel does not care to reveal that. This time he can say with certainty that his patient’s apparent detachment from reality is not his fault.

Emil walks in to ask how Sigrun is doing. She answers his unspoken question by waving her hand under his nose and saying “I am unfit for human consumption.”

“Then if you did not persuade my niece to take a higher dose than she knew she could tolerate, pray tell, what did?”

“Her injury. Combined with her menstrual cycle- oh for the love of science, Emil, it’s not a curse. Menstruation, menstruation, menstruation, menstruation-”

Emil lets out a roar to cover up what he hears as some kind of taboo and scurries from the room with his hands over his ears. Mikkel finds this aversion to discussing the time of the month is a lot more common in men who do not have sisters or close women-friends.  
Sigrun is amused by the chant. She picks it up under her breath as she crouches to the ground, tickling the cat’s belly exposed in a sunbeam.

Trond clears his throat imperiously “If I may?”

“Pardon the sidebar. You may.”

“Yes, well, regarding her women’s problem, they are unusually painful. She won’t complain of course. The woman is Viking stock. I assume she has already told you the story-”

“Of the time her appendix got inflamed and she ignored the pain because she had had cramps worse before.”

“Many times?”

“Only every time the story occurs to her.”

“Many times, then.”

“Domesticated cats…are they domesticated or are we?” Sigrun is now on her back, the kitten washing its paws on her chest. The two of them contemplate each other in the friendly way the curious “Like, are we domesticated by them? What else do you call it? Getting up at the crack of dawn to feed something ‘cos it’s got its face in your face and it’s screaming for food. That sounds like domesticated to me. Maybe it’s like, more of an uneasy truce. Yeah. Sounds good to me. They’re predators you know, these little guys,” she takes the kitten’s front-paw gently between two fingers and bobs the digit up and down like they are shaking hands “Vicious predators. Like their mama. Freyja’s the queen of love and cats are the minions of love.”

“Are you hearing any of this drivel?” asks Mikkel.

“Yes, unfortunately. She sounds quite far gone. Still, it is pleasant to have her docile for once, is it not?”

Mikkel shoots an uneasy glance at his captain as she attempts to mimic the cat’s purring “Uh.”

“Unless you’re attacked, that is. Then who will you sic on the trolls?”

“The scout I suppose. He broke a troll’s neck with his bare hands the other day.”

“Great gods, I knew Sigrun was going to infect all of you poor people with her crazy.”

“Actually I am quite confident that particular feat was fuelled by Lalli’s own brand of crazy. Back to the matter at hand, what do you recommend doing for Sigrun until she is sensible again?”

Trond lets a ponderous silence fill the radio for a few seconds. Mikkel wants to urge him to keep the conversation going, because he can already hear the garbled whispers for help and mothers coming in from the Silent World- the radio interference in this region is just awful.

“Have you got a closet in there?”

“Yes.”

“Stuff her in there until she’s finished with her high.”

“I…I’m afraid that’s a little too Draconian a solution even for me. Can you recommend anything else?”

Trond scoffs “Oh don’t be such a wimp, son! Back in Dalsnes we used to pop Sigrun in the closet every time she had dental surgery or got a bone set. The woman can be absolutely insufferable when she is drugged.”

Turning to look over his shoulder, Mikkel sees that Sigrun is now cuddling the kitten in the sunbeam. The look on her face is at once beatific and completely lunatic.

“Well, if she’s in no immediate danger-”

“Just stick her in the closet. That is, if there’s room for her in there, what, with the Västerström boy being in there already.” Trond lets out a wheezy laugh at his own joke, then without waiting for Mikkel’s response, severs his end of the connection.

Mikkel stares at the radio control board for a long moment. If it were possible to reach through a radio cord and slap the person the contraption was most recently connected to, Mikkel would do it with relish.  
Instead, he turns.

“Sigrun.”

“Mikkel.” she smiles at him “When did you get here?”

“Oh not so long ago. How do you feel?”

“A bit squishy. You know, like things aren’t quite right on the inside. I might have to burp in a second.”

“That’s fine-”

He is interrupted by what Sigrun calls a burp, but what he feels is more appropriate to term a ‘battle cry’. The noise spooks the cats onto all-fours. In the next room, there is the unmistakable sound of a mage jolting awake on the top bunk and falling off in surprise. Lalli pokes his head around the door to glare, then slinks outside, wrapped in a stolen blanket.

“Better?” he asks Sigrun.

She nods “Much. Except I don’t think my head is attached. Can you take a look at my neck? Is it still there?”

Mikkel has her tilt her chin up “There it is. Firmly attached as always.”

“Great. Excellent. Hey Mikkel.”

“What?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m dreaming all of this.”

“Oh?”

Her face is certainly dreamy at the moment “Yeah, totally. What should I do about that?”

“Lay down, perhaps.”

“Ah but that’s a boring way to use a dream. I should do something fun, like…”

“Like?”

A manic glint enters her eyes “Like slay a dragon.”

“Dragons aren’t a thing.” he reminds her gently, but she scoffs.

“Says you, you non-believer.”

“Even if they are a thing, why would you want to slay one? What has a dragon ever done to you?”

“Nothing much except give me nightmares as a little kid.”  
At once her eyes roll into the back of her head and she falls asleep, right there on the floor, beginning to snore delicately.

He tosses a blanket over her and hopes the peace will last. The others are given strict instructions not to wake her on pain of snow-scrubbing.

Emil makes the mistake of asking what that is.

Mikkel is then forced to demonstrate by knocking Emil over and thrusting a handful of snow down the back of his jacket, which panics him so that it reduces him to his most basic prey instincts and sends him scuttling under the tank for safety.   
After that, the day passes peacefully. Almost sleepily. Lalli is struck by an unusual amount of lethargy which becomes infectious. As he dozes next to his cousin in the book room, Tuuri’s eyelids droop and her head bobs over her work. Reynir dozes on his feet like a young horse. Emil gives up on staying awake entirely and has a nap in his bunk- and is swiftly joined by the usual suspect, who steals half the blanket and half the pillow and curls up into such a tight ball under the covers that Mikkel has to look twice to confirm it is actually Lalli down there and that the cat hasn’t had a huge growth spurt.

The cat settles on top of Sigrun’s head and has a nice nap.   
Perhaps it is Sigrun’s sleep that has made them all so tired? Mikkel has to admit, even he is having a hard time staying awake and focussed while he should be transcribing. When awake Sigrun is a powerhouse of energy, running around, sounding like a war-chant even in her normal speaking voice, occasionally pinching people in the sides to make sure they are still conscious and aware of what they need to be doing.

She wouldn’t allow Reynir to doze like a colt on his feet; she’d send him towards Mikkel with a mimed instruction to make himself useful. She wouldn’t allow the scout and the Cleanser to spend the afternoon dozing practically on top of each other; she’d let Lalli sleep and make Emil do something productive and involving explosives. She wouldn’t allow Tuuri to drool on her books; she’d make her get back to work.  
And as for Mikkel? Well Sigrun has never seen Mikkel struggling to stay awake, so she is likely to want to watch this strange and hysterical ritual for a while before she spurs him into action.

Mikkel has just concluded that he is actually missing Sigrun’s jovial influence on the group when he sees her sit bolt-upright, somehow without dislodging the cat. She rises, deposits the still-sleeping kitten on Emil’s shoulder (and Lalli’s face), and strides out of the Tank.

Mikkel pokes Tuuri in the arm.

“I’m awake!” she cries as she snaps awake.

“You are not,” he nods at their captain “What is she doing?”

Sigrun answers this by flopping into the snow flat on her back. She spreads her arms and legs as if she has just fallen from a great height, then tucks them back into her body in a pencil-straight shape. Then she repeats the process.

“Making snow angels.” says Tuuri around an enormous yawn “Wait, what? Is she still stoned?”

“Insensible is the word you’re looking for which, yes, she is obviously still is.”

“What do we do about it?”

“Get her inside before she gets killed. Or frostbitten- Sigrun! Where are your shoes?”

“Good question!” she answers.

Mikkel grabs a jacket from the back of Tuuri’s chair and goes outside, packing Sigrun into it against the Arctic winds. He turns her by the shoulders and ushers her inside the tank.

“Geddof.” 

“Would you like to hold my hand instead?”

She acquiesces to this after a moment’s thought and lets Mikkel lead her back into the tank.

 

About five hours later, Sigrun rises in the middle of the night. She is confused to find herself sitting in a pillow-fort on the floor of the cockpit.  
In the driver’s chair is Mikkel, a book in his lap, relief on his face.

“Are you prepared to make sense?” he asks, closing the book.

Sigrun rubs her sore temples “Wow. Ouch. Never let me take that much painkillers again. I apologise for whatever stoned Sigrun said to you or did or whatever.”

“Well after you were finished declaring yourself sub-par meat and making snow-angels, you had me hold your hand for half an hour so you could read the messages under my fingernails.”

“I what?”

He shrugs “I don’t know. All I know is that you’re banned from dosing on painkillers except from the most bare and basic doses, understood?”

She nods with a yawn, then jumps in surprise as Mikkel slumps backwards against the control panel into a deep sleep.

“Poor guy. I must have tired him out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of this may or not be based on what I thought and said after a surgery I had last year.


	60. 23: Cat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kitty's last day of patrolling before she retires as a battle cat. Something totally unexpected happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a weird one. Hold onto your butts.

It is unanimously agreed that Lalli and Emil should take Kitty for her last patrol. During the second Long Winter, Sigrun referred to Kitty as their ‘practice baby’. Her jab turned into a prediction which came to be over the years. It has been five years since the first mission and for the last four of them Kitty has lived with Lalli and Emil as a kind of surrogate child.   
She does all the things children are expected to do; crawls into bed between them with cold paws, arrives at the foot of their bed to yowl for food, chases birds in the yard, gathers praise from their friends whenever she’s around to be cute and generally does her best to keep Lalli from getting a full night’s sleep by standing on his face.

Typical child things.

Whenever Tuuri asks if they’re going to get around adopting now that the Long Winters are no longer running (in the sense that none of the original crew will be running them anymore; the duty has been passed along to a much larger unit, well-equipped, well-trained, and all of whom Sigrun expects to die within two days of their setting off), Emil’s response is to point to the cat.  
“I can’t bring a child into the house with Kitty here.”

For any number of reasons. One being that Kitty is a demanding presence in the household, though well-loved. She and Lalli have long-since put their territorial disputes behind them. They exist in a peaceful truce, even sharing Emil’s lap. The deal is that if Lalli happens to rest his head in Emil’s lap and Kitty wants a piece of the cuddly-Swede action she is allowed to sit on Lalli. While the problems of territorial disputes are gone, Emil has had a few nightmares concerning some faceless, anonymous child in a crib in the room adjacent to his suffocating under Kitty. Nightmares about the same dummy-child disappearing down Kitty’s gullet in one gigantic gulp.  
And then there are the nightmares which feature only himself and the child, where the child meets their demise due to Emil’s spectacularly inadequate parenting skills- exploding, contracting the Rash, being carried away by a dragon or something else along those lines.

He is sure he can take care of a cat without killing it.  
Lalli’s opinions on parenthood is somewhat foggier. On the rare occasions that they do broach the subject, the conversation goes something like this.

“What do you think about kids?”

“Human larvae.”

“What would you think about if we …hatched a few of them ourselves?”

A look will flash over his face. It is in between affection and sheer terror. The exact look he gets on his face whenever he sees Emil’s cousins coming- still affectionately nicknamed the Norns.   
“Um.” is all he will get out.

And then Emil will relent and thank him for his honesty.

What Lalli has not really said yet is that he is afraid to have kids. Adopted, surrogated or otherwise. Losing his family was the most traumatic experience of his young life, though he cannot remember very much of it, and has left him with a certain shyness when it comes to the thought of starting another. He could end up losing his hypothetical child to the very real threat of the Rash or trolls. Emil might go with them. He could end up dying, and Emil with him, and leaving their child to the mercies of the world.  
Well, to the mercies of Tuuri’s parenting skills. She has already forgotten where she put her mysteriously begotten son Ville about twice and Lalli wouldn’t trust her with any of his hypothetical babies as far as he could throw her.

So for a long time they satisfy any brooding needs they have by devoting the attention to the cat that the cat demands. A good deal of it, sometimes taking Emil’s mind off the children he wants, sometimes taking Lalli’s mind off the fear of leaving the children he might one day have marooned in a sick world, but never quite banishing the idea.

On the day of Kitty’s last patrol, the entirety of the crew is in attendance. Two new members as well. At her relentless request, Mikkel has brought his two-year-old daughter along to wish good luck to Kitty. The newest Madsen, named Sigrun and called Siggy to avoid confusion with her namesake when Mikkel asks his offspring if she wants a nap or a snack, is beyond excited to have all her honorary aunts and uncles in one spot.  
She totters around and latches onto a leg every now and then. She will tug on the sleeve of whoever’s pants it is she has and melt their heart with a gummy smile, then doodle off to her next target.

Ville is too young to be very excited. All he knows is that his audience is slightly larger than normal so he takes the opportunity to try out a few of the words in his tiny vocabulary.

While Kitty basks in the attention, Ville points a chubby digit and his Uncle Lalli (second cousin) and burbles “Lal. Lal. Lal.”

Lalli offers Ville forefinger, which Ville immediately pops in his toothless mouth to suck on. He seems disappointed that no milk comes out.

“Can you hold him for a second?” Tuuri hands Ville over before Lalli can acquiesce, and bends to stroke the cat with Sigrun “Oh, what a good girl. You’re such a good girl.”

“Thank you.” says Sigrun. 

Kitty purrs loudly.

“Kitty!” exclaims Siggy.

“Kitty.” confirms Mikkel, patting his progeny on the head.

“Kitty go home?” asks Siggy.

“Kitty go forest. Kitty’s having her last day as a soldier kitty.”

“What she do?”

“After, she’s going to retire.”

“Retire?”

“Stop working. Lots of naps and bridge in the afternoons.”

Siggy’s eyes light up at the new word. She begins to mutter it under her breath in a squeaky mantra “Bridge, bridge, bridge.”

Ville does not appreciate the competition “Lal. Lal. Lal.”

They make eye contact. Tension crackles. Each infant is shortly shrieking their head off. Lalli calmly takes Ville’s pacifier out of Tuuri’s bag and corks it in his mouth, cutting off the newest shriek into a contented burble. Siggy is pacified a second later when Kitty rubs against her ankles.

“I can’t believe it’s retiring time already,” says Sigrun “I mean, I thought she’d have a few more years in her. At least to seven.”

“Perhaps if she had the other eye it would be a different matter.” says Mikkel with a touch of regret. It was with him that Kitty lost her left eye.  
She chased a troll into a derelict house and pointed Mikkel in the appropriate direction, but while he was in the middle of putting down the troll he did not notice Kitty putting down a much smaller prey of her own. Only when the last head was juicy fragments under his feet did he turn and see Kitty, her jaws bloody and blackened with pus, standing panting over a small and twisted corpse with her left eye gashed out of her skull.

On that day many remarked they had never seen Dr Madsen run so fast back to the medical tent and were surprised to find it was a cat he was saving. The way he held the bloody bundle was like he held a child instead.

“Hey these have been some good years. She’s basically been doing this since she was born.” Tuuri scoops up Kitty and tickles her tummy playfully.

Still purring, Kitty bats at Tuuri’s hand. The two enjoy an impromptu wrestling match for a few moments, until Ville sees and starts to whine jealously around his pacifier. Tuuri deposits Kitty on the ground and retrieves her son from Lalli.

“You looked cute,” says Emil in Lalli’s ear.

“Did I?”

“With a kid hanging off you. Like a terrified new parent.”

Lalli corrects him “Terrified new uncle.” 

The time to set off comes quickly. Kitty is uncharacteristically lucky to leave her adoring audience, but training trumps her wants and she pads into the woods after Emil and Lalli.

“Stay safe!” calls Reynir, who has so far been crying so hard with a mix of pride for his kitty and sadness that it is her last patrol that he hasn’t been able to speak yet “Take care of each other!”

“Watch out for trolls!” adds Tuuri.

“Lal!” says Ville. He shrieks with delight when he is rewarded with a goodbye-wave from his uncle.

“Stay on the path!” says Mikkel.

“Punch and shoot everything that moves!” shouts Sigrun.

“Punch!” echoes Siggy “Punch all!”

 

“I was hoping Kitty would get to have one last good fight on her last day.” 

The end of the day has come swiftly. The sun is well on its way to sinking beneath the horizon. Shadows lengthen and deepen. Emil’s flamethrower is cool and has remained so all day. Lalli yawns widely, exhausted from a long day of doing very little. Only Kitty is still full of energy and vitality. She leads the way home, casting a glance behind her every now and then to make sure her humans are still in tow.  
They trail along behind her hand-in-hand and passing back and forth the same yawn.

“I’ll hand-wrestle her later.” Lalli looks over his shoulder warily.   
He does not trust forests at night. His start in the professional world as a night-scout has given him a healthy respect for what the dark can produce and little hesitation when it comes to disposing of those things. But still, he doesn’t exactly enjoy wandering around and waiting for something to attack them.

Emil is a tad less concerned. He knows from experience that Lalli will be able to protect them from anything which may come along to bite off their heads. All he has to worry about is tripping over a loose stone or branch.

“I’m sure she doesn’t mind though. She’s killed plenty of nasty things in her time. Haven’t you, Kitty?”

At the sound of her name, Kitty looks at Emil. She quickly looks away again in disdain when she sees he offers no treat. Emil laughs.

“Tired?” he asks sympathetically as Lalli yawns for the fifth time in as many minutes.

Lalli nods “Long day.”

“It’s almost over. Then you can sleep, I promise.”

“I’m going to need at least eight hours tonight to have a chance of getting up tomorrow. Don’t you stand on my face, you hear me, Kitty?”

Up ahead, Kitty has stopped. She is perched on the top of a flat rock that is just about taller than both of them. The look on her face is the feline equivalent of disdain, which is normal. Out of force of habit Emil and Lalli stop too. When she stops it mostly means she sees a troll- but usually she poofs her fur out and hisses like a demon to make sure the message gets home.  
She is calm this time.

Kitty licks her front paw, regarding her humans thoughtfully.

Then she opens her mouth and says “You need not worry about your face nor my paws upon it from this moment forward, my friend.”

Lalli blinks “Ok, I’m hearing her talk. I might have to take a nap right here.”  
He looks over at Emil for permission to make himself a nest in the moss. Emil’s mouth is open. His eyes are as wide as dinner plates.

“He heard me talk as well. I am talking, Lalli. Look at me doing it. Talk, talk, talk, words, words, words.”  
Kitty is pleased with herself. Especially when Emil’s legs spill out from under him and Lalli has to catch him, lowering him safely to the forest floor.

“I have waited for this day for a long time. I mean, I suppose I wish it was further into our future. I would not have minded putting in seven years as Sigrun suggested I should.”

“You’re talking.” manages Emil.

Kitty does something with her face that looks eerily like a smile “Certainly am. Listen, boys, my time grows short. I am needed back where I came from.”

“The Silent World?”

“Oh, Lalli, you charming goof. You’re going to lose it when you see who I am.”

Kitty transforms right there and in a halo of light and an explosion of music. The perfume of flowers that have not grown in the Known World before fills the clearing. Then, standing on what is now a verdant, flower-speckled carpet is a tall and beautiful woman. Her hair is dark. Her skin is fair and her eyes are almond shaped.

“Now,” says Kitty, her voice like a stream or a spring’s breeze “I have taken the liberty of appearing to you in my own skin and nothing but because I have completely forgotten how to do clothes. And you’re gay and demi-sexual respectively, so I’ve really got no reason to hide myself.”

Ever the gentleman, Emil stands and hands over his cloak. Kitty accepts it with a smile and drapes it about her shoulders. She feels no need to close the front however.

“Oh my gods.” says Lalli.

“Not quite.” says Kitty.

Emil squints at her face “Your eye is still gone.”

“For the moment. Now that I have returned to my full powers the scar should heal itself within the month-”

“Your gods!” blurts Lalli “Emil, that’s Freyja!”

Emil falls silent. He looks between his husband and his patron goddess a few times, then sits back down.  
Freyja is a goddess he knows well. She was elected to be the patron god of Cleansers by some Norwegian commission who thought there was unmistakable beauty and cat-like ferocity in tearing Rash-beasts apart. Since he accepted the pagan gods as his own, he has worn her sigil around his neck. For years.

“I’m going to faint.” he announces.

Lalli puts a steadying hand on his shoulder “You’re alright. Lord Freyja…what…what are you doing? Pretending to be a cat?”

“I’m so glad you asked!” Freyja spreads slim and muscular arms, as if embracing a very large and invisible person in front of her “It’s kind of a funny story! So, you know your myths. You know how everyone is either trying to marry me or marry me off?”

They nod.

“Well, when the Rash hit, Asgard was hit as well. This Rash thing is a kind of spiritual terrorism. What can I say? It’s what happens when we let out security on Fenris go lax and the silly Greeks let their security on the Titans and Tartarus relax at the same time, and some enterprising traitor finds a way to connect those two, then boom! World-destroying virus and tortured spirits everywhere. The All-father came up with a plan about fifteen years ago to offer my hand in marriage to this god from the South- Xolotl or something like that with a lot of ‘zee’ noises. Plague god, you know? The agreement was that Xolotl would abandon his people and come and help us fix this problem in this region of the world. And everyone thought it was a great idea!”

Emil is out-raged on her behalf “What? He can’t just marry you off! Pardon me for blaspheming against the All-father, but what a dick!”

“I know, right?” Freyja runs a hand through her hair and snorts in frustration “I wasn’t going to deal with that! We had no guarantee it would work. And anyway, Xolotl should have agreed to come out of the goodness of his heart. Not because he had some pretty face waiting to fill his bed chamber. I left. I disguised myself as a cat and lived as a cat. I have lived nine lives.” her face grows soft “This is my ninth. My time in this form has come to an end. I’m afraid I must leave you.”

Lalli frowns “Are you ill?”

“Me? No. I’m not ill. I’m only ready to go home, I suppose. I always knew I would be ready to return in my ninth life. I have to say, it’s been fun. It’s been the best life of them all so far. You were all wonderful friends.”

Emil has begun to tear up. Partly because he is so over-whelmed by the sudden and strange turn of events. Mostly because he has just realised his cat is saying goodbye “You’re not going back to give your hand, are you?”

Freyja snorts. Glitter shoots from her nose and strikes a tree-trunk. A bunch of lillies immediately spring up from the bark.  
“No! Of course not! Xolotl has finally agreed to marry another in my stead. Thor, if you can believe it. I suppose they had enough time to get to know each other and fall in love. Isn’t love wonderful when it happens like that? Naturally? Like a surprise? It is my main function, you know, aside from being astoundingly hot and running with a gang of cats. Love. I knew from the moment I saw you two that you were meant to be.”

“Duh.” says Lalli.

Clutching at his heart, Emil manages to stand once more. He wipes his eyes on the back of his sleeve and smiles gratefully at his husband when Lalli winds an arm around his waist “What do you want us to tell the others?”

“Tell them I died peacefully…um, you may want to spice the story up for Sigrun, actually.”

Lalli thinks for a moment “We’ll tell her you crawled into a bear-beast’s skull and ate so much of its brains you got sick and died of indigestion.”

Freyja’s smile is so dazzling it actually blocks out the moonlight for a second “She will like to hear that. But before I go, I want to thank you for allowing me to be a part of your lives for the last five years. All of you, of course, but I want to bless the two of you right here.”

She jumps lightly from the rock and collects them both up in a strong hug. Emil notes her skin smells like the harvest season and hugs her back, hard, thinking of how much he will miss having a cat settle on the back of his neck every time he sits down to read. Lalli notes the aura of magic coming off her is absolutely insane and berates himself internally for missing that he had a goddess literally standing on his face for the last five years. He hugs her back too.

Freyja has begun to tear up when they part. Her eyes are wet with liquid gold “I’m going to give you something that’s going to keep giving back. It will be a challenging road, but I know it’s one you both want to take. And one you’re both going to love. Give me your hands.”

They each place a hand in hers. Unexpectedly, a claw slides out from each of her forefingers and slices their fingers open. Lalli watches impassively. Emil cusses in surprise, then falls silent.

Freyja releases their hands and stoops, scooping a rock the size of a human head and the shape of an egg from the ground. With something like reverence, she smears the blood from either finger over the surface of the rock. Emil’s blood goes lengthwise in a band. Lalli’s around its middle in a similar loop. Where the loops cross, the blood already glows.

Freyja holds the rock in her palms and lifts it to the light of the moon. Her hair streams in a warm breeze. The cloak billows around her.  
And she brings the rock to her forehead and spits it open with a neat head-butt. The rock splits in two. She now holds a screaming, damp and slightly bloody newborn.

Freyja glances down at it “It’s a boy! Congratulations.”

She whips off Emil’s cloak and swathes the baby in it with tender care.

“Um.” says Emil.

“What?” finishes Lalli.

“This is your son. Look, Lalli, he’s got your nose. I mean, I think he does. It’s hard to tell right after they’re born. They always look like squished potatoes.”

The significance of the situation hits them at about the same time. Emil covers his mouth with one hand and reaches for his son with the other. The child has a fuzz on the top of his head that suggests he’s going to be as blond as an egg when he gets big. Lalli takes the baby from Freyja gently, supporting his head expertly, and stares down at him in wonder.

The baby bawls a little more quietly.

“He’s beautiful.” says Lalli.

“A beautiful squished potato.” agrees Freyja “Well, he’s yours genetically. He should be immune. He’s probably going to have Lalli’s cheekbones. I hope so. They suit you Hotakainen men so well. Be good to each other.”

Casually rising into the air, Freyja soars into the moonlight night and disappears into the white shadow of the moon with a slight, fizzing pop.

Emil and Lalli barely notice. 

 

Twelve hours later, the baby is named, bathed, fed and burped, and the story has just been finished. Lalli and Emil are on either side of their bed with the newly named Hannu dozing in between them. He has a firm grip on Emil’s fingertip, a contented look on his puckered face.

Sigrun is the first to speak “I bet you anything this kid is going to be as magical as all get out.” 

“Well, yeah, duh,” Tuuri is beaming at her new baby cousin “A baby created by a goddess? We’ll be lucky if he isn’t controlling the tides before his second birthday.”

“I’m more worried about cats. Freyja is the goddess of cats. He might have an army of cat minions.” says Mikkel.

His is the face of a man confronting a paradigm shift. Though the frequent and impressive displays of magic Reynir and Lalli and other mages he has come across have been chipping away at his atheism for years and worn it down to an uneasy agnosticism, Mikkel is still stunned. Here is the proof of what he is reluctant to believe.   
The gods of Asgard exist. By extension the Finnish gods are probably still kicking too, and the gods of many other pantheons that he was happy to write off as myth up until Emil and Lalli barged in from the forest with a newborn and the radiant expressions of freshly minted dads.

Reynir has been on and off patting Mikkel on the back to comfort him, but he cannot really tear his attention away from the baby for long. Reynir is transported by wonder at the baby’s simple human beauty and by a kind of ungrudging jealously for Emil and Lalli’s happiness. They earned it, obviously, and were rewarded, unexpectedly, but Reynir cannot help but wish Freyja had whipped him up a quick infant as well.

“So what do you think she meant when she said she would bless us all?” he asks, then immediately answers his own question “With good health and that kind of stuff?”

“I guess.” says Lalli absently.

Sigrun punches the air, but keeps her voice low so as not to stir the baby “No more summer colds for me!”

Tuuri groans with relief “Great, I hope it’s health. I need to get rid of these pains in my back.”

“I think he has my nose.” Emil leans a little closer to inspect his son’s face better “He does. The poor thing.”

Hannu Hotakainen whimpers in his first sleep, but does not wake. He is content to sleep between his fathers for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The implication of course being that the screaming and sleeplessness of early parenthood will come along later. Well, that was a danged essay, wasn't it?
> 
> Butts still on everyone? I went there, folks, I explained my weird and needlessly complicated and nonsensical idea about how Lalli and Emil have a child. Adoption? Too sensible and normal! A rock baby from the goddess that was disguised as their cat for five years! No one would ever see that coming, right?   
> (I didn't see it coming until I formed the head-canon and started questioning my own sanity)


	61. 48: Childhood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Onni remembers what it is like to raise children again, thanks to the help of the three little demons the Vasterstroms insist on calling children.

Onni’s childhood ended at fifteen. He had other jobs handed to him when he hit fifteen. The job of providing for his remaining family members, of ensuring they had as much of a childhood as was in his power to give them. This mostly amounted to the monumental task of getting Lalli out of the house every morning to get him into school and socialising with other members of his own species to whom he was not directly related to. Then there was Tuuri’s unruly years, which made him grey prematurely.  
Traditionally it is only the girls of the Hotakainen family which are born with greyed hair. Lalli was a freak of genetics, and Tuuri’s teenaged years chased every single scrap of black from Onni’s hair before he reached his twentieth birthday.

But he does not for a moment regret his decision to raise his family. Handing them over to an orphanage or a foster family might have been the more pragmatic option, but Onni always shudders to think how another set of people might have tried to deal with Lalli, unaccustomed and closed to his strange mind and stranger ways. And Tuuri? No one would have put up with as much nonsense from Tuuri as Onni dealt with. If he had entrusted her to other people they would have murdered her within a week and buried her in the backyard without a modicum of regret.

Onni considered doing the same thing many, many times, most recently on the docks at Keuruu.

When Tuuri made the choice, she made it for the family. It is just a component of her inwards-looking nature that she did not realise what it meant to Onni to let one of his family members out into the world which terrified him so. He might have had time to adjust and warm to the idea were she doing something a little less dangerous that throwing herself head-first into unknown danger.  
And taking along Lalli was just rubbing salt in the wound. Tossing him into the sea, covered in cuts and letting him pickle in the salt rushing into his wounds.

Lalli is Onni’s favourite person in the world. He loves Tuuri just as much as him, of course, but finds Lalli’s company so much easier to stomach. Lalli isn’t confrontational. He’s just kind of begrudging and shy and Onni enjoys their stunted conversations the most in the world.  
So of course Tuuri had to rope him into this. Tuuri could not just remove herself from the equation; she had to bring Lalli along too. This would not be the first time Tuuri has roped Lalli into something without much in the way of his consent on comprehension. Onni sincerely doubts Lalli had the faintest idea of what he was doing when he signed on to the expedition into the Silent World. 

He seriously considered pushing them both off the docks and holding them under for daring to break his heart like this. He more seriously considered punching Hollola in her stupid smug face, right off the docks, then beating her on the head with an oar until she sank.   
How dare she? How dare she swoop in and rob him of his family? Of twelve years of hard word to stay sane and keep them sane and the sacrifice of what could have been a pleasant enough childhood, by the somewhat sour standards of the sick world.

He realised on the first night that he was not going to be able to handle the separation. Not from this vantage point anyway- skulking in Finland with only his bitter thoughts and the faint traces of his family for company. If this terrible, awful thing was going to happen to his family then he needed to be as involved as he could. 

It was the night before Onni made his decision. He fully planned to sleep that night, of course, but ended up walking into the wrong room and laying down on Lalli’s bed.  
The simple act of getting close to some bedding that smelled faintly of his favourite person sent him into literal hysterics. Onni slithered off the bed and cried underneath it for a few hours. He may not have stopped had he not become dehydrated.

Onni made his decision standing over the water pump, red-eyed and dry-mouthed. He screamed it to the sky as a kind of positive affirmation.

“I’M COMING TO GET YOU, YOU LITTLE SHITS!”

Four minutes later the neighbours on either side came over to make sure Onni was alright.

 

Onni expected trouble. That is all the outside world is good for. Trouble and loud languages he only half understands. He assumed the great task would be making it through with his nerves intact. For a non-immune person travelling for the first time out of his own, comparatively safe and cuddly country, this was the hardest part initially. Each sneeze became a certain sign of the Rash. Each time he had an itch to scratch he had to inspect the offending space for the tell-tale Rash, and thusly ended up spending a lot more time inspecting his genitals in bathrooms than he had since he first hit puberty.

He made it to the house in Mora healthy and intact, though again dehydrated.

Onni made the mistake of thinking his suffering from that point on was going to be devoted to worrying about his family.  
What he did not realise was that the Västerströms had three young kids. Nor did he realise that he might be concerned to be a person who is good with kids, just because he reared his sister and cousin. Had it been in his vocabulary at the time, when Siv had posed the question of acting as a kind of nanny to the kids to him he would have said something along the lines of…

“I’m sorry, but have you seen my family? I love them. They’re wonderful. But Tuuri is evil and Lalli can’t hold a conversation for more than two minutes before he climbs a tree to get away! Ma’am, I WILL ruin your children. Keep me away from them. No, I’m not being modest. Any child I attempt to guide and shape will turn into the epitome of evil or social awkwardness.”

But all he could think to say was “Sure.”  
Had to earn his keep somehow.

And so Onni finds himself in a second round with that monster called childhood. 

The monster manifests in the form of the set of triplets. Malin, Nils and Sayyida, all of whom are already evil without any of Onni’s influence. Trond refers to them as ‘the Norns’. When Onni looked that term up in a book of Norse myths, he felt that the picture of the three malignant wraiths he found could have been modelled from the Västerström children. 

During the first week they manage to slice a good chunk of his ear off while he is in a magical trance saving his family’s life. During the second week, one of the girls (it is impossible to figure out which one is Malin and which one is Sayyida, though he is definitely aware of one being more evil than the other, and holding the position of ring-leader) put a frog in his toiletries and bed, then gave up entirely on subtly and stuffed one directly down the front of his shirt when he bent to ask her to repeat something.  
By the third week, Onni broke out the big guns.

From talking to a few Swedes in the same line of work as him, Onni had learned to tell his country’s urban legends in Swedish. Nights got slow when they were crafting runos with nothing else significant to occupy their time. Story-telling sped them up.  
When one of the girls, the more evil of the two, voted that Onni tell them a bed-time story in favour of their father (who tended to get distracted by the old-fashioned morals of the kids’ classical story books and paused frequently to explain to his girls why gender roles were bull-crap), Onni refused to read one of the proffered books.

“Why not?” demanded the most evil of the Norns “We like that one!”

“Yeah!” the other two chorused “Read it, read it!”

“I will not.” said Onni from the foot of the middle Norn’s bed “I’ll tell you one of the stories I told my family when they were little.”

They pulled varying faces of identical disdain.   
And by the end of the story they were all clutching each other in terror.

“So,” Onni concluded “If you do not go to sleep before the clock has struck ten, then the fearsome Moomin will break your bedroom window and drag you to his forest lair. There, he will put you in a pack of snow to keep you fresh until it is time for his midnight snack.”  
The story was adjusted somewhat to suit the pallet of children. When he told it to his age contemporaries, the Moomin targeted those walking alone at night, ripped heads off and presented them as tributes to his ancient and evil god, the Groke. 

They were clustered at the headboard of the same bed when he left them. When Siv went to wake them in the morning, she found her children asleep in a small pile and bristling with objects they had intended to use as weapons; a lamp, an antique baseball bat and a fork.

After that, the children regarded Onni with a kind of reverence. It was not respect. It was not affection. It was the recognition of a fellow – possibly even an equal- who was not afraid to use underhanded tactics to make his charges cooperate.

 

The end of the winter has come too fast, and the children are clinging.

“Don’t go Onni!” shrieks Nils from his left leg.

“We love you Onni!” shrieks Malin from his right leg.

“You’re the only one that makes toast the way we like it!” shrieks Sayyida from his chest, which she clings to in the manner of a baby possum hanging off its mother.

Their mother watches from the side-lines in a mixture of bemusement and injury. Siv is smart enough to know that she has not been replaced by Onni, but just neglected enough by her children that she is jealous she has never had them proclaim their love for her so freely as they do for Onni.

Onni stands tall and strong, packed, kitted out for the wintry trek back to the station, and trying very, very hard not to burst into tears. Nils is already crying. He will become completely hysterical if is revealed to him that Onni can cry as well- Onni has been careful to restrict his occasional facial leaks to quiet and dark corner. It will ruin the children’s view of him as a kind of demigod if he busts into tears in front of them.

So he focusses on Lalli’s face. Lalli and Tuuri are waiting at the end of the walk for him, beyond the gate where he spent his first night in Mora. He tries to keep himself from crying by focusing on the little smile Lalli wears because he hasn’t seen that since Lalli was fifteen years old. It may have something to do with the blond standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him, but Onni isn’t going to worry about Lalli’s nonsense while literally being weighted down by his own.

“Kids,” he says, soft and reasonable “Kids, you need to let go of me for a second.”

“No! You’ll run away!”  
He has no idea where Nils got this impression, but he seems convinced.

Torbjörn tries again in vain to talk his children down “Kids, we’re doing this all again next winter! You can see Onni then, right?”

“Right.” confirms Onni.

Sayyida shrieks “We have to wait a whole YEAR?”

The other two add their concerns to the dissenting voices: “But what if he DIES in Finnish-land?!” and “What if he DOESN’T GET TO COME NEXT YEAR AND WE’RE ALL ALONE AND WE DIE BECAUSE NO ONE’S LOOKING AFTER US?!”

Emil claps a hand to his forehead and mutters something apologetic to Tuuri that Onni does not catch.

Siv, on the other hand, is a bit offended by the suggestion that her kids think she will neglect them “No you won’t. We’re going to be here all year, like we always are.”

“But we want Onni here too.” whines Malin.

Onni sniffs and disguises it as a cough. A tough, manly cough from a tough, manly man who is not about to start weeping on the six-year-old clinging to him. He opens his mouth to assure to him that he will come back next year, though he is not yet sure of this, but Taru beats him to the punch.

“Onni has a life in Finland he needs to get back to.”

Yes. A life. His job. His empty house, while his family train in Dalsnes under the watchful eye of a madwoman who’s literal first words to him were “So did you teach Lalli to be that crazy, or did he come out that way? ‘cos if you can learn the kind of crazy he’s got then I want all the tips you can give me.”  
He looks at Sigrun. Sigrun is disinterested in the melodrama, cleaning her nails with a knife the size of Onni’s forearm.

Mikkel seems sensible, on the other hand, so it will make Onni feel a lot better to know he will be there to keep the kids in check in a few months.

“Yes,” he grunts “A life in Finland. I’ve got one of those. Got to get back to it.”

Nils lets out a miserable wail. Unable to stomach this any longer, Onni scoops him up and pats him on the back. Before he can reach for Malin she’s up on his other shoulder, and then they’re all hanging off him like three huge, sobbing, distended udders. 

“Ok.” manages Onni, clutching them to him, his bag dropped into the snow “Ok, I know. I’ll miss you all too.”

“Don’t go!” whines Malin.

“We’ll miss you!” adds Nils.

“And what if you never come back?” finishes Sayyida.

“I will. I promise I’ll come back, even if it’s just to visit.”

Someone coos behind him. Someone else scoffs; probably Trond, who has been shaking his liver-spotted head with disgust since the goodbyes began.

“You know what?”

They all crane their necks back to look at him, each little wet face full of the hope that he’s decided to stay after all.

“This is a part of childhood,” he smiles weakly- he is not used to doing that with his face “A lot of people come in and out of your lives to help make you better people. I promise I’ll come back. I’ll come back and help again, but until then, don’t think about me in a sad way. Just think about what I’ve taught you to do while I was here.”

“Make toast.” sniffs Malin.

“The way to put my blankets in bed so monsters won’t get my feet.” whimpers Nils.

“Speak some Finnish.” chokes Sayyida. Then she adds in Finnish “And swear.”

He rolls his eyes. They are at the age where they think ‘idiot’ is a swear-word so he’s not going to bother to correct that, lest they attempt to discover what the real swears are.

The little thought exercise has calmed them. Onni lowers them to the snow and then, one-by-one, picks each one up for a last goodbye hug.

He says to Malin “Remember to brush your teeth if you don’t want wooden dentures.”

He says to Nils “Eat all your vegetables or you’ll turn orange.”

He says to Sayyida “Listen to your parents. They’re smarter than you, most of the time.”

Trond scoffs again. Onni makes a rude gesture at him without turning, concealing it behind his back so the children won’t learn it.  
He leaves them in the gate, squeezing in against each other to wave goodbye and watch him until he reaches the corner of the street. Nils bursts into fresh tears and it takes all of his willpower not to dash back and mop him up. 

Onni makes it. By the skin of his teeth, he makes it.

Tuuri lays a hand on his arm “Are you alright?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crying.” notes Lalli.

Onni looks at him in surprise “And you’re speaking Swedish?”

He shrugs and strategically avoids looking at Emil “A little.”

“No, really.” Tuuri persists in Finnish “Are you alright?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine. Just went through a second childhood this winter, that’s all.”

Lalli cocks an eyebrow “You what?”

“I was a child again through those children.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Onni pats him on the head. He missed doing that. He missed the way Lalli ducks out from under his hand and that betrayed little glare he fixes him with when Onni dares to make physical contact.   
He missed everything his family and suspects, for a long time, he will miss everything about that other little family he just left behind, to grow and forget him for a year, then welcome him once more in the following winter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sayyida? Now how did that name get in there? Let's assume they named her after Siv's fourth grade teacher. Yep, that sounds like a good idea to me.


	62. 40: Dragons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sigrun and Mikkel play knights and go to battle against the dragon which terrorised Tuuri

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Unusually crass mouth on Sigrun. She takes the chance at being away from the 'kids' to cuss to her heart's content- but, you know, not really.
> 
> Also, I'm going to go off the radar for maybe three days after posting this. Travelling out of Australia is a day-long chore and recovering from the trip is going to take some time too. It will be a while until I'm lucid enough to write again, but until then, please enjoy this short story about Sigrun and Mikkel going up against a dragon.

The first day Tuuri is allowed to leave the tank on her own (briefly, to take a few photos in an area they already know to be safe) she tears back within ten minutes, screaming about dragons. As she is apt to do in times of extreme distress, before she can produce any clearer explanation of her terror she throws herself at Lalli and switches to Finnish to describe her near-death experience.  
Mikkel does a quick eye-check of signs of the Rash on her. Seeing no rips or tears in her clothing, nor cracks in her facial mask, he relaxes by a modicum. Once her sobs have melted into gentle whimpers in Lalli’s shoulder (who pats her on the shoulder with a practice awkwardness and seems to be straining both away and towards her at once; torn by his natural hate of physical contact and concern for a loved one) Mikkel approaches and tests the temperature of her forehead on the back of his hand.

“Healthy,” he pronounces “Not delirious at all.”

“What?” asks Reynir in Icelandic.

Sigrun stands by with her arms crossed and one hip jutting out at an unbelievably sassy angle “Then what the Hel is wrong with her? If she isn’t dying why is she screaming like- well, like Hel herself just rocked up and asked to French-kiss her soul?”

Emil wrinkles his nose “That’s so lewd.” 

“Silence you prude. I’m trying to figure out what’s up with Stubby.”

“Dragon!” gasps Tuuri for the fifth time. Her face is buried in Lalli’s collar, so her next words are muffled, but still perfectly clear “I was almost killed by a dragon.”

Emil and Mikkel catch each other’s eyes almost by accident. They exchange the sympathetic look of two cautious agnostics among a group of fervent believers and each give a little sigh, as if to say ‘well here we go again’. 

Lalli asks something in Finnish. Tuuri responds in much shakier, garbled Finnish and lets him wipe her eyes on the back of his sleeve.

“Tuuri, there are no dragons in this part of the world.”

Mikkel is stunned. Both because Sigrun is using actual names- he always suspected she comes up with such a colourful variety of nicknames because she cannot actually remember the real names of her team- and because Sigrun rejected the magical explanation. She blames nearly everything which goes wrong on the supernatural.  
Thunderstorm? Thor is obviously delaying the team for some reason or having a fight with his wife. Someone gets stung by a bee? Well, that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t somehow angered Freyjr. 

His personal favourite happened less than a week ago when a slight, small earthquake set the tank rocking and the snow outside dropping off trees and bouncing about like powder being swept from a kitchen-counter. Sigrun was woken up from a midday nap and came to stand in the doorway of the tank. She bellowed: “Fenris, you knock it off you son of a Loki! I’m trying to sleep! Quit trying to throw off your stupid chains and go back to your stupid sleep!”  
The earthquake stopped as soon as Sigrun stopped shouting. Excellent timing, but then, Mikkel kind of expects a few other peculiarities from a woman who blames seismic activity on a gigantic wolf tossing and turning in a fitful sleep.

He turns to Sigrun “Why don’t dragons live here?”

She gives him a pitying look- pitying his lack of faith or something “Why would they? This isn’t anywhere near the coast or the mountains. Everything here is sick. What are they gonna eat?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I heard that,” she turns her attention back to Tuuri “Listen, kiddo, whatever you saw wasn’t a dragon. It was probably just a shadow.”

Tuuri leaps to her feet. Her fear is cast to the side in favour of indignation. He has noticed that Tuuri is very good at indignation.   
“A shadow? I know what a fucking shadow looks like! That was not a shadow! That was something alive and- and it wasn’t sick. I swear. It was breathing and moving like a healthy thing. It was alive. And it tried to eat my face.”

Meanwhile, Reynir still has no idea of what is going on. He looks helplessly at Mikkel for translation.

“Tuuri thinks she was almost eaten by a dragon.”

Reynir’s eyes widen “But dragons don’t live in this part of the world, do they?”

 

In the end there is nothing to do but mount a search. Sigrun is far too curious to see this mock-dragon to let the issue lie, so she ropes Mikkel into her search, leaving Emil to act as the designated responsible adult should anything go wrong at the camp. Tuuri has been given a cup of herbal tea to calm her nerves and a thoughtful present from the cat- her favourite chew-toy (what used to be one of Reynir’s socks), deposited in Tuuri’s lap to clutch for comfort.  
Though it is against every one of Mikkel’s instincts as a senior member of the team and a big brother who has seen just about every form of trouble kids can get up to when left to their own devices, they leave Emil reclined on the windshield with a rifle in his lap and an Icelander beside him to keep him company with chatter he does not understand. Reynir’s mask is around his neck. The Hotakainens are inside the book-room/office, presumably with Tuuri being comforted by Lalli, though from what Mikkel saw Lalli’s idea of comforting is mostly just occasional pats on the head and a blanket around the shoulders, then awkward silences the rest of the time.

Mikkel almost wishes he could trade places with Tuuri. If it were under Tuuri’s blanket getting his head patted by their scout, and Tuuri trailing behind this striding madwoman, he would not mind the scare. Facing a supposed dragon sounds a lot more attractive than trying to keep Sigrun from throwing knives at everything that moves, then herself head-first at everything that moves twice.

They are taking the main road into the town. Most of the strange, hard black grit called tarmac has given way to the springy grass and creepers Mikkel prefers. What little of it remains serve as Sigrun’s stepping stones; she hops across them like a child playing that classic ‘the floor is made of trolls who will eat me the moment I touch them’.

While they walk, they trade conjectures.

“Probably a big-ass squirrel. Stubby was probably scared out of her fuzz-head, being out on her own for the first time,” Sigrun surveys a large gap between her stepping stones with disdain and has to lunge to make the gap. She straightens, her arms pin-wheeling “Poor kid. I can tell you one thing. The little miss isn’t going out on her own again.”

“Because of dragons?”

“No, because she’s making dragons out of shadows. Can’t be a dragon. Can’t be an anything. This place is as clean as virgin vagina.”

Mikkel covers his face “Good gracious, woman, do you kiss your parents with that mouth?”

“What? Can you blame me? I’m a soldier, not a grandmother! I’ve been holding back with the kids around. Can’t be teaching Skinny his curses before his conjugations.”

“Remarkably responsible of you.”

“Why thank you. Hey, doesn’t this crack look like a smiling face?”

The conversation kind of ambles up until they get to the town. Sigrun’s mouth becomes progressively fouler and Mikkel is reminded of his later years as the eldest son of his own household. When his younger siblings finally reached their teen years, they proved their adulthood by cramming as many curses into sentences as they could. Their punctuation were slurs against each other’s mothers, though they all shared one. Their adjectives were words that’d burn ears. Their connectives were insults so foul Mikkel lost his temper a few times and washed mouths out with soap.

Sigrun is not quite this bad, since she favours milder words like ‘ass’ and ‘bastard’ over the ones Mikkel would slap her for saying if she were one of his younger siblings. Even at the ripe age of thirty-two there is simply, in his opinion, no call for foul language.

“Well slap my ass and call me Judy. That is a dragon.”

He stops beside her and looks down the main-street. It is relatively untouched by the apocalypse, except for rusted cars and cracked pavement and fallen lamp-posts. Sigrun is pointing to the end of the street at a half-crumbled fountain.

“That’s a fountain.” says Mikkel.

She swats his arm “I know that! The thing on top of it- look, look, there it goes!”

Before he can really see what it is, something scaly whips off the top of the fountain where it was sunning itself a moment before and scuttles rapidly into the darkness of a derelict house.

“Let’s not-” he begins.

“There it goes! Let’s get it!” shouts Sigrun. She sets off down the road at a pace that would make a prize racing horse jealous.

“-run in there without a plan.” finishes Mikkel. He sighs and follows her at a much more modest pace, cursing her under his breath all the way.

Literally the moment Sigrun leaps over the torn threshold does she scream and leap back out. Scream? Mikkel has never heard her do that before. He kind of assumed she did not know how to scream in fear, like normal humans, but replaced the scream with a battle-roar instead. 

She fairly bounces off Mikkel and in the process somehow manages to draw a knife from her boot- her boot, why the boot- which she slashes at the air with.

“Back, demon!”

Mikkel backs up. Then realises she was talking to that thing squatted monstrosity in the doorway and pretends it never happened.

“What the Hel?” he says, briefly borrowing one of his friend’s gods for effect.

“It’s a baby dragon or something!” Sigrun bumps him back again as the ‘dragon’ scoots over the threshold.

“That’s not a dragon. That’s some kind of…what is that?”

A long, forked tongue flicks into the air and zips back into the mouth. The skin is a wrinkled dusty grey. It is massive. Half the size of Mikkel, not including the long tail which skims the cracked tiles behind it.

“I have no idea what that is.” he announces and finds that he’s gripping Sigrun by the arm.

“Looks like a snake grew legs,” she hisses “We have to kill it.”

“We don’t know what that is!”

She frowns “You’re right. Could be a scared animal. Some drunk-ass god fooling around.”

“Or it could bleed concentrated acid!”

“Oh come on, that only happens in those shitty old urban legends. Let’s just get out of here.”

The thing, the dragon, cannot wait for them to do so. So it decides to help them along by charging suddenly with a mouth like a cave open and a noise like a kettle asking to be taken off the stove.

“Son of a shit!” barks Sigrun.

“Nope I’m not dealing with this!” barks Mikkel.

This time, he’s the one running at the speed to put a racing horse to shame.

 

“This is what I saw.”

She points to the photo of a crouched and grey thing, posed with its long tongue out and its blank eyes trained on some invisible prey out of the frame. Lalli leans over her shoulder to get a better look at the book.

“Where did it come from?”

Tuuri shrugs “There was a zoo here. Maybe some mated pair, pairs, got out once the world was gone. I don’t know how they’d survive this climate though. This passage says they’re made for heat.”

“What’s it called?”

She squints at the title. Years have taken a toll on this book; the ink is spotty and faded. “Ko…Komodo…Komodo dragon.”

Lalli shows her a rare and wry smile “So you did see a dragon.”

She smiles back at him “I guess I did. I hope Sigrun and Mikkel get back soon. This makes me feel so much better about everything.”

Her cousin shrugs “They’re probably fine.”

“Yeah. Level-headed veterans. They’ll be fine. They’ll probably just walk away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gosh bless them convenient zoology books they just happened to find.


	63. 42: Stand still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the final test to Finnish scouts involves a situation where they must prove they can stand still and stay silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The recent drama sure isn't what I was hoping to see after coming back, but I'm sure it will resolve itself, being the honest lost-in-translation moment that it is.

It’s a ritual they have in Keuruu. Not a safe one, but a certain one; certain in the sense that anyone who does not manage to pass the requirements of this particular ritual at least once in the ten times people are permitted to try that there is no way this person will manage to survive in the field. 

The ritual goes as follows. 

A scout reaches the end of their training. The scout is put in a concrete enclosure which is empty at first, with strong glass mounted above like sky-lights where a number of significant figures in the Finnish military watching, accompanied by the best snipers on hand. A door at the other end of the enclosure is opened and out is ushered a troll.   
The troll which Lalli encountered had seen so many scouts through- or rather failed to see scouts- that it had a name. It was named after the single word it was still able to pronounce clearly.

A woman was there to meet him at the beginning of the hall that lead to the enclosure.

“We call it ‘Mama’ because that’s all it ever says,” the woman explained “As far as trolls go this one is quite docile.”

Onni was not mollified. The thought of his baby cousin being stuffed into a concrete coffin with one of the monsters that their existence literally revolved around avoiding terrified and enraged him.   
“Docile?” he repeated “Docile in what way? Does it only go for bites on the leg? Will it leave his jugular alone? Is that how you qualify ‘docile’?”

Lalli laid a hand on his arm. This simple physical contact was enough to render Onni silent. Lalli did not normally suffer to be touched. 

The woman obviously knew her business. She made no attempt to placate Onni. Nervous and abrasive guardians were things she knew her way around. Once she was sure Onni had said all he was going to say on the subject, she continued.

“You’re going to be in the enclosure for five minutes. Snipers will be posted around the top to take care of the troll, should it notice you in any way. This troll…this troll is sensitive. You understand we have to pick trolls with relatively keen senses to make sure our scouts will be able to deal with the prime examples they will encounter in the wild. Minimising your movement is imperative.”

“And if I mess it up?”

“Then you’ll be covered in troll-gunk when we have to blow its head off.”

He waited until the door has closed on Onni to ask the question he really wanted to ask “Is it true that someone died here last month?”

The woman didn’t turn. He has to stare at her back. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“She sneezed.”

This time, she did turn to get a feel for his general mood. She seemed offended by his apparent refusal to be perturbed.

“You’re a confident one, aren’t you?”

Lalli didn’t meet her eyes. Instead he looked sideways at his own shadow, trailing along the wall behind him “I know what to expect.”

“So…so you are one of those Hotakainens? From Saimaa?”

She got no answer from him.

Soon enough, they arrived at the door. She paused, thinking Lalli would want a moment to compose himself, until he stepped up to the door so that his forehead was almost too it. As if he could see straight through the door.  
The woman opened the door and shut it tightly behind him. Lalli’s footsteps echoed. Too loudly for his taste. Looking up, he found himself surrounded by all manner of spectators in uniforms which made them look like a great smear of grey paint, broken by the spots where the paint had been too thin, spots of brown and white, concerned and anxious faces filling up the glass so that he had no idea whether there was any sunlight in the room with him, or if all the light was coming from the steady electric lights overhead. 

At odd intervals the barrel of a rifle emerged from the crowd. They were all trained at the door at the other side of the room.  
The eyes were all on him in the centre of the room.

“Hotakainen!” one of them called down.

Lalli did not look up.

“Hotakainen, are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain you-”

“Yes.” he said, louder “I am.”

Silence fell. Something like five seconds later, the door slid open. For a moment it was just a square of darkness. Then a single, bare foot was raised from a height of about four feet and lowered daintily to the ground. The foot reminded him eerily of Tuuri’s for its shape- chubby so that the toes were ringed, pale in colour, and even with an over-long third toe. Onni was fond of saying it was a sure sign Tuuri was actually the fruit of some foul fairy union; his real baby sister had been swapped and taken to live with a fairy family.

If that was true, then whatever Tuuri might look under the skin she wears cannot hold a candle to what steps out to meet Lalli.

It’s a flower, if flowers had more than one stem. Close to three dozen stems. Each of which are legs and most of which do not match. They come in a variety of colours. Some had jingling steps from ankle-bracelets. Some are tattooed. Some have managed to cling to a few of the scraps of socks or shoes that their original bodies wore during the infection.  
The top half was a rotten blossom of flesh with no distinguishable anatomy, except for a large and distended jaw that hung in roughly the front of the blossom. The jaw was so crowded with teeth it had the troll bending, scraping the jaw along the ground, and the multitude of legs straining to keep the shared top-half upright. Legs at the back were occasionally lifted from the ground to hang limp and sullen, to twitch briefly as if remembering what it would be like to struggle against the monstrosity it had become, but ignoring the impulse almost in the same instant.

Lalli did not allow himself to move. He did not allow himself to cry out in shock or fear or disgust, though he felt all of these things more strongly than ever before. Except for the one day in Saimaa. And it was the people in Saimaa that he was doing this for.  
So he caught up the terror and nausea and packed it into a dull ache, then stored this ache behind his eyes and let a few tears slip out. He cried sparsely and silently as the troll titled its head this way and that, exploring the room was best it could.

Lalli had just begun to think he might be able to make it through the horror when the creature spoke.  
The voice was horrible. More horrible than the ones he had heard in Saimaa. Even the ones which were calling his name by the end of the night. The voice was a singular, childish voice, in spite of the obvious range of ages of the legs attached to it.

“Mama?” it asked with a practiced fear “Mama?”

Lalli stopped himself from screaming by a small margin. He softened his breathing. He shut and opened his eyes slowly. The troll had made its way closer in the brief time it took to do this. Reaching inside himself, Lalli found the memory of that night in Saimaa and all of the nights since and grasped it with two hands.  
And he turned himself off inside.

If the troll had decided to bite him as Onni thought it would, Lalli would not have screamed. He would not have felt the pain. His vitals operated on the level somewhere between the body of a deep sleeper and the body of a brain-dead person.

“Mama.” repeated the troll insistently.

A whisper began at the back of Lalli’s mind. Several dozen whispers, each one announcing some death cry. Last words. Usually all trapped spirits are able to remember at last worlds. This troll was no different.   
Lalli did not listen to them. Lalli did not allow himself to confront or accept the idea that there were many other minds pushing at his own, demanding a peace he was in no place to grant them.

The troll’s shadow fell over him. It was like being pushed backwards into a barrel of clammy and long-dead fish.

It walked towards him, completely unaware he was there.

The jaw scraped noisily along the floor. Lalli slowly cocked one leg up behind him without so much as a rasp of clothing and ducked down, at the same time that the jaw began to pass over his head. He stepped carefully through the open jaw and stepped smartly to the side, well out of the way of the raft of the legs that buoyed it up. There, he stopped. He made no attempt to put his back to the wall of the enclosure for safety. He made no attempt to get behind the troll.

He just stayed where he was and waited for what would come next.

Nothing else of note happened. The troll discovered the far wall and spent the remainder of the five minutes allotted cracking its jaw against the wall, trying to get through.

A sharp crack sounded from inside the still-open door. The troll charged back the way it had come, with another plaintive cry of “Mama!”  
Lalli let it lurch past him without batting an eyelash.

The door slammed shut on the troll. The moment the slam reached him, Lalli lowered himself to the floor and sat cross-legged, his head bowed. He took several long and deep breaths.

When the crowd began to applaud, he gave no indication he heard them.


	64. 77: Test

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A good old-fashioned Modern!Au where our crew are taking math tests and regretting every life choice which lead them to this point

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Playing a bit with the head-canon that Lalli is autistic. While I'm aware that autistic savants are rare, I thought it might be a cool-ish replacement for his mage abilities, and be in keeping with the idea that his thought patterns are slightly removed from the standard.

If there is one thing about autism that Lalli unquestionably benefits from, it is the savant side of it. Very few autistic people are also savants. That happens about as frequently as albinism- so, every now and then, but always a cause to double-take when it’s seen. Lalli’s savant tendencies aren’t geared towards a particular subject, but two of them. He can both draw like no one’s business and slice his way through the most complicated mathematical equations like a hot knife going through thin butter.   
He has done both in the short half hour that passed since the test began. If it had ever occurred to him to be thankful for the advantages his autism had given him, then he would have thanked his gods fervently and silently the moment he clapped eyes on the test. But because Lalli is so good with numbers his concept of what is hard is very different to the rest of his class. He just sees the questions and thinks ‘someone really likes Trigonometry’, and gets down to it. 

It takes him all of fifteen minutes to get through the test paper, then ten minutes to thoroughly check all his answers. He catches a few carrying errors and one misplaced decimal, then looks towards the clock at the front of the hall and sighs inwardly. Another half hour before he can leave. He wishes he had called in sick, if only to have this interminable half hour to himself. 

So he picks up his pencil again, flipping to the back page of the exam and starts a complicated sketch of the back of Reynir’s head. Reynir is sitting in front of him. The panic coming off of him in waves is a kind of brutal chemical smell. Lalli does his best to ignore it while also getting the right slant of the light on Reynir’s thick braid.

Reynir, meanwhile, is on the verge of tears.   
He knows he knows this question. He knows he can do this. He spent close to five hours on the weekend studying quadratics specifically because he could not do a problem like this one, and he mastered it, and now that he is confronted with one on the test paper he is not even sure of his own name anymore. Three minutes have ticked past in a panicked silence while he wills the numbers to arrange themselves into a sensible order. Reynir wishes he were dead or dying. Anything to excuse him from the next one and a half hours. He should have called in sick. 

Three rows to his left, Tuuri is in a similar position, except with the gnarled demons that are circle theorems. She risks a glance along the row to her cousin, just behind Reynir (who looks like he’s about to cry) and is disgruntled to see he’s already finished.  
Damn him. She got the social skills in the family, but Lalli definitely has more than his fair share of brains. God, why did she not call in sick today?

Tuuri promised herself she would not try it this time. She always tries it and always feels like an idiot because it has never worked and never will work and she just embarrasses herself. But she has no alternatives left to her.  
She presses two fingers to either temple and closes her eyes, thinking of her cousin with all her might. Or rather, AT her cousin. She tries to build a tendril of sheer mental distress to reach out to him. To latch onto the genius in that strange brain and make some of it hers. There has been something like it in the family before; the time Tuuri broke her arm in a car wreck at midnight, Lalli got out of bed and went downstairs to tell his parents they were needed at the hospital. Ten minutes later the call from the hospital came to say the same. And then there was the time Tuuri had a dream about Lalli getting a fishing hook caught in his hand, and the exact same thing happened on the lake the next day.

Obviously, they have some kind of psychic family rapport going on. Tuuri just needs to figure out how to activate it. So she strains with all her might in the mental direction of her cousin. She shouts his name in her thoughts. Her face begins to turn red with the effort.

“Tuuri, are you alright?”

She looks up to find Professor Madsen standing over her, an eyebrow cocked in surprise or concern.

She smiles manically. Oh if only he knew how clever she is. Using latent psychic abilities to cheat.   
“Just fine sir.” she hisses through gritted teeth “I’m doing just fine.”

“Really? You look like you’re about to bust a vessel.”

“The vessel of truth, sir. I’m about to ascend to a higher level of thought.”

Professor Madsen nods slowly “Would you like to sit this out?”

“No sir, I’m on a roll.”

Seeing there is no way to salvage Tuuri Hotakainen from whatever whirlpool of insanity she has been sucked back-ass-wards into, Mikkel Madsen scoots along. He is pretty sure he saw Lalli was finished, and a quick glance over his way confirms this.   
Fantastic portrait of Reynir on the back of his test. If Lalli isn’t dragged into MIT he might well end up in Europe, or some other major artsy scene, putting the masters of the craft to shame with what he refers to as ‘doodles’, and what the art teachers refer to as ‘astoundingly accurate anatomical details, with just enough of a touch of surrealism to remove them from this realm of the normal.’ That was what the comments on the Arts section of his last report card said anyway. Sounded like a damned review from an art gallery opening.

A little ways behind Lalli is Emil, who looks uncharacteristically calm, considering this is a math test. Mikkel has taught Emil since Emil was a tiny middle-schooler and though he belongs to the Sciences faculty, he has been there for every single one of Emil’s math-melt-downs or the aftermaths. When Emil had a massive panic attack upon being told his class would begin calculus, it was Mikkel that coaxed him out of the vents and sent the firemen home.   
When Emil fainted in the end of year exams last year, it was Mikkel that brought him around with a few gentle slaps and a liberal squirt of some borrowed Lynx Attract to serve as smelling salts. Finally, when Emil privately informed Mikkel he was thinking of dropping out of high-school to avoid doing a math test ever again, Mikkel convinced him to stay. He did this by offering Emil a lift home, then driving him to the minimum security women’s prison instead while the prisoners were outside.

He pointed to a woman that seemed to be starting a fight “See that woman? Taught her two years ago. She dropped out because she was phobic of maths too. Now she’s in prison.”  
Mikkel did not mention that her phobia of math tests and prison sentence were mutually exclusive; the woman had ended up in prison thanks to chronic anger problems and a lengthy list of assault charges. But it scared Emil into silence, and now here he is, taking his test, looking like he has either achieved enlightenment or passed the point of caring about how he does.

As Mikkel watches, Emil flips the page over. He pauses. His expression does not change at all as he lowers his forehead to the paper and desk, and knocks it there a few times. Probably wishing he had called in sick today.   
He’ll be fine. Emil isn’t actually bad at math. He just has a nervous disposition which makes him automatically assume he will be terrible at everything, though he will say otherwise until prompted, and effects his performance.

Emil raises his head and rubs absently at the red mark on his forehead. Mikkel sees him mouth ‘you can do this’ and pick up his pencil.  
Emil pauses. He hits his forehead once more on the table and lets out the faintest whine of despair, then starts on his paper again.

“Attaboy.” says Mikkel under his breath.

He retreats to the front of the room. Most of the other teachers prowl the rows like tigers or sharks, keeping an eagle eye out for cheaters or fainters. Except for Sigrun Eide; a teacher that doubles as both an incredibly intense gym instructor when the regular, milder one is out, and the most amusing History teacher that has ever been on the face of the earth. She has a penchant for forgetting the names of significant historical figures and using nicknames instead. Mikkel’s personal favourites include ‘Tiny Pastry-man from France’ and ‘Her Majesty, Queen of Booty’ (as in treasure, she maintains), for Napoleon and Queen Victoria respectively.

When he arrives at the front of the room Sigrun is busy with a game of Angry Birds. She greets him with a nod, not meeting his eyes until every single pig has been blasted from her level. Only then, with a victory cheer muted behind a hand, does she look up at him with a smile.

“How’s Emil doing?” she whispers.

Mikkel gestures towards him “Working. Working through his panic. I imagine he’ll get through this in one piece.”

“Let’s hope so- hey, is Lalli done already?”

“Yes. Sketching the back of Reynir’s head when last I saw him.”

Sigrun shakes her head in wonderment “That boy must have been raised by wild computers. I swear I can hear him beeping sometimes in math when I sub for his teacher…is Tuuri ok?”

Tuuri is turned to the ceiling, mopping up a slight nosebleed with a tissue. She looks mad as a wet cat.

“She’s fine.” says Mikkel “Ticked off, but fine.”

“Reynir’s crying again.”

“Oh? Those look like tears of joy to me.”

“He must have remembered his formulas.”

Mikkel drops into the chair beside Sigrun, sighing inwardly, and glances at his watch. Another thirty-five minutes before he can think about leaving.  
Sometimes Mikkel doesn’t know whether the tests are worse for the students that take them, or the teachers that have to watch their students passing through various stages of insanity, as they themselves are slowly claimed by an aching boredom and an itch to do something that does not involve peering hawk-like over shaking shoulders.

Mikkel wishes he had called in sick today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please ignore the chronological improbability of them all being in the same grade. And Sigrun is the most best History teacher. Sure, she embellishes about half the significant battles with Transformers wizards, but you gotta keep the kids interested somehow.


	65. 61: Dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun and Lalli come across something strange in the woods.

Sigrun and Lalli do not work together very often, but when it happens, the results are always interesting. 

It is not that they do not like each other. It is just that there is not much occasion for a Lieutenant Colonel and the Scout-master to hang out alone. Sigrun has a flock of soldiers at her command now. They fawn over her and try to accompany her everywhere, determined both to protect her and to absorb some of the famous Eide-grit which has sustained her through the last forty years.   
Lalli, too, is responsible for the coordination of a whole mess of scouts and rangers and mages, and basically ensures that any threats which are bound for Mora are nipped in the bud. Half of the time, he does this with a toddler strapped to his front, who has made a habit of parroting the orders his father gives and confusing the scouts who apparently cannot tell the difference between their voices. 

Time is short. Life is busy. They are both important people, but will occasionally find the time in each of their busy schedules to share a patrol with each other. 

This is what they are doing today. Sigrun enjoys Lalli’s company immensely, for his talent for companionable silences and quiet, helpful ways. Lalli enjoys Sigrun’s company equally, for her talent for constant, good-natured yammering and her loud, friendly ways. They have had close to a decade to figure out the dimensions of each other’s personal space and are comfortable with each other.  
So the patrol is actually a welcome break from their lives, both the separate and the frequent parts which overlap.

“…rather take a stuffed rabbit doll along with me than any of the other soldiers, you know? They’re all about as useful as wet noodles in the dark,” she says as she squints into the moonlight, then pushes a branch to the side for Lalli “The training you got was top-notch, buddy. These days they just toss the kids into an empty room with the lights off.”

“Mine was traumatising.” says Lalli, ducking as Sigrun lets the branch spring back prematurely.

“Traumatising? Really? I think it was innovative.”

“There’s a reason they out-lawed it.”

“Because the Finnish authorities are afraid of progress.”

“Because about five people were killed by the trolls every year.”

“A minimal loss compared to the kinds of scouts it produced- hey, an owl.”

Sigrun points. Sigrun is always pointing out animals, especially when they are fluffy, as this owl is fluffed out against the slight chill of the spring night. It’s an owl of the snowy variety and looks like a piece of preening moonlight in all of the gloom around it. The owl regards Sigrun with disgust and leaps into the air, soaring away without so much as a whisper of wings.

“I love owls.” remarks Sigrun.

Lalli does not reply that they seem to hate her. He doesn’t want to hurt her feelings.

They are something like two kilometres into a dark forest on a search for any nests of trolls which might be beginning to stir as the winter thaws away. Currently, the movement on the Danish front means that fuel has to be preserved and spared all across the Known World to save as much as is possible for the International Forces on the front, which Mikkel is healing and which Emil was going to be leading from the front lines if he had not had a horrible dream about dying with Lalli in an accident on the front (even though Lalli is basically a whole nation away), leaving little Hannu an orphan and poor Hannu growing up under the wing of a vicious, drunk step-mother who made him do all the chores.  
Now Emil is coordinating the battle from a little behind the front-lines and keeping in above-average regular contact with his family.

Lalli does not worry about dying on the job, because if he did, he would not be able to do his job. Often the thought strikes him that he should not really be striding through the dark depths of the infected woods with a toddler at home. He brushes this thought to the side each time. However, the prospect of his baby being raised by Tuuri haunts him- he’d grow up to be such a shit.

“There’s magic out tonight.” he says.

Sigrun frowns at him. His mind drifted, so he does not realised he has just interrupted her. She was talking about scouts again, though, and this sounds more interesting, so she decides to let him go on “How do you mean?”

“I mean there’s magic out tonight. The spirits are coming out to celebrate the snow melt. The winter spirits have all gone to sleep.”

Even though Sigrun doesn’t have a modicum of magical ability in her blood, she looks around for a hint of spiritual activity “Really? I didn’t know they went to sleep- spirits, I mean.”

“Bears do.”

“Spirits aren’t bears.”

“They’re close sometimes.”

As she looks, Sigrun’s eyes catch on a golden spot of warmth in the distance. At first she does not believe she has seen it. She squints and shields her eyes against the moonlight “You see that?”

“See what?” he looks at the long, slithering spirit crossing the path in front of him. For a brief instant of incredible horror, Lalli thinks Sigrun might be developing mage abilities.

“That thing?”

He almost falls down with relief when she points into the far distance.

“What the Hel?” he says.

“Looks like…well it doesn’t look like a campfire, but it should be a campfire. We need to check that out.”

She catches the weird, judgy look on his face.

“What? It’s our job, you dork. We’re supposed to investigate strange things.”

Shouldering his rifle, Lalli sighs. He is not going to argue. Anything weird in the forest could bring its weirdness to his baby boy, and to a lesser extent the rest of his town and much of the other people he might be able to claim to love.  
“Let’s go.”

Sigrun pats him on the shoulder in appraisal- she has long since learned to save her wallops for people who actually like human contact. “Attaboy.”

“I’m twenty-eight.” he mutters.

“Atta-man.” she says over her shoulder, the grin obvious in her voice.

The closer they get to the light, the clearer it becomes that the light is no ordinary fire-light. A densely populated fire, that is. The light does prove to be a fire-light when they draw closer. In the middle of a clearing a fire crackles roars, at least half the height of the surrounding trees.  
The weird, flickering effect that seemed to make the light ethereal is revealed as the fault of a crowd of figures dancing about a fire. Strange figures. Figures that are not human nor the kind of non-human with which Lalli is familiar.

Antlers. Flowing cloaks. Limbs like branches, firelights shining through hair that is moss and leaves, jewellery of berries and polished river-stones flashing. Strains of song that shoot straight to the stomach and make one sway on their feet.

Sigrun catches herself about a tree trunk, pressing her forehead to the bark “Oh, gods, shut them up.”

“No.” Lalli wraps an arm around her and makes her crouch so they are screened by the brush “No, they’re weird. They’re…they’re different.”

She swallows her nausea and shakes her head sharply “What do you mean? I need some clear terms, Lalli, I need to know what this is.”

“Foreign.” it’s more of a guess than a judgement “They look like our spirits, but they’re not. I don’t recognise all the plants. I don’t know the language.”

Sigrun pauses, straining to listen. Her face pales “Are you sure you don’t recognise that?”

“No.”

“It’s English,” she mutters “My nation’s second language. It’s rare. Not a lot of people use it anymore, even among us. I never learned to read it.”

They lapse into a stiff silence. The dance goes on. The movements are flowing, graceful, reminiscent of water frothing in rapids when the dancers are caught in moments of fever and passion, and the fall of a leaf from an autumn tree when the pace is slowed, breath is caught, and layers of clothes are shed against the combined heat of the fire and exertion.

“Where do you think they’re from?” whispers Lalli after some time- impossible to guess how long, however.

“They’re speaking English. They’re probably from…from Great Britain.” it takes her some time to remember the name of the distant, abandoned island.

“We need to go.”

She says nothing, but only nods. They stand together, still holding each other for either comfort or balance, or both.  
They leave the dance in the darkness and will not speak another word about it for the rest of their lives.


	66. 47: Create

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something close to a decade before the mission, Mikkel is having some difficulties in Bornholm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pardon my long absence. Family reunion. I was cavorting in the Atlantic waters with cousins and grand-people and distant cousins. You never realise just how much family you have until you're somewhere attractive, and suddenly they all want to visit you. 
> 
> The original idea for this prompt concerned Lalli and Reynir accidentally summoning a demon, but hey, giving birth is kind of the same thing. The thing lingers and robs you of sleep and knocks over and breaks stuff and makes unholy noises in the small hours of the night.

The act of creation is one which is often practiced in the Madsen household.

Mikkel’s mother is more usually pregnant than not. This may be about to change, considering her hair is greying and her limbs are no longer as spry as they once were, signalling the approach of infertility. Mikkel cannot pretend that the prospect of impending menopause does not fill him with relief. But then, his feelings on the subject are kind of confused. 

As a younger woman, she suffered a violent illness which doctors warned her might leave her unable to reproduce. She was a year into her marriage with Mikkel’s father when she fell pregnant, with twins no less, and has since taken the doctors’ words to heart as a kind of great challenge. Her new-found fertility became a hobby. The resulting children, badges of achievement and trophies, like a collection which she could show off to her neighbours.   
On some occasion when she has had a chance to gather all of her progeny in one place, Mrs Madsen will parade her family past the window of the practice which once condemned her to infertility and pull faces at any unfortunate doctor which happens to be within the view of the window of the break-room.

Mikkel and his twin sister are his mother’s first achievement. He has always felt she regarded them as a test-run; a prototype made by her inexperienced womb, in an attempt to cobble together the most attractive and desirable traits available to her in both the Madsen and the Jeremiassen gene pools. Being that his father is Greenlandic, and therefore somewhat rare and well-known for his non-Danish looks, Mikkel suspects his mother was disappointed when she got a pair of common blonds on her first try.  
It does not necessarily matter to her that they have the almond-shaped eyes which identify them as an Inuit of some description. Nor does the mutual possession of the Madsen family nose redeem them in her eyes. Mrs Madsen loves the twins, but she does not love to look at them.

Their little brother, the third child, was a different story, and Mrs Madsen made sure to brag about this with the distinctly Greenlandic name of Inuk. He got the shiny black hair she was hoping for. However, he was also born without a left hand, so Mrs Madsen had not quite got the hang of making children yet.

As the second-oldest child of a number which eventually swelled to eight, Mikkel has felt the responsibility of creation all his life. That is to say, the responsibility of another’s creation.

When the eighth and final child was coming along, Mikkel had to say something.

He said something bent over the stove in the kitchen. The two-year old Otto (brunet and therefore disappointing) was strapped to his back in a doze, the five-year old Ingrid (blond, but turned ashy as she aged, to her mother’s delight) was clinging to his leg and bawling for him to find a misplaced teddy bear. His hands were slowly broiling in the steam of the kitchen. His mother was seated a safe distance away as she combed out his brother Inunnguaq’s long raven hair. Inunnguaq was fourteen years old and not allowed to cut his hair. He bore his mother’s doting attention grudgingly, and repaid her by refusing to cut his nails so that they were always grown out to incredible lengths and made it difficult for him to do his chores.

“Can you make this the last one?” he said loudly over Ingrid’s screaming.

“What did you say sweetie?”

“I said, can you please make this the last one? No more children.”

She gave him a sharp look “You don’t want another sibling?”

“Frankly? I’m satisfied with the ones I have so far.”

“But aren’t you excited to meet the new Madsen?” a hand fluttered to her belly, still flat in the early stages of the pregnancy “I always get so excited when I’m expecting.”

“Mom, you’re always expecting- alright Ingrid, in a minute.”

“Why are you wearing Otto on your back?”

Mikkel fought the urge to roll his eyes. He also fought the urge to throw the soup spoon at her, which was much stronger “Otto has a cough. He’s uncomfortable in his crib. He can’t sleep when he lays down. I’ve been carrying him to let him get some sleep without exhausting himself into it first.”

“Ah,” she turned over a sheaf of Inunnguaq’s shiny, shiny hair “Why don’t you go to the apothecary tomorrow?”

“I already went. They’re out of the medicine for this cough. It will be in by the weekend, but until then I’ll just carry Otto.”

“I could do it.”

“No you couldn’t.” he muttered.

“What did you say?”

“Inunnguaq needs to feed the cows.”

His fourth sibling and second brother sprang up and ran out of the kitchen so fast that when he bumped the door he tore the whole thing off its hinges.

Seven months later, the eight and last child slid out like a greased seal on smooth ice, practically rocketing out before the midwives had a chance to catch her. Perhaps out of a feeling of guilt by his parents at all he had to do in the upkeep of his siblings (high-lighted to his mother by the Otto incident), Mikkel was allowed to name her. He considered briefly naming his little sister ‘Winner baby’ out of spite when he saw her black, black peach-fuzz, but decided on Oline instead.

Conception and birth are not the only habits of creation in the Madsen household. Mikkel’s twin, Mikkela, is quite fond of carving wood. She does this with a giant knife borrowed from their father’s hunting belt (with no intention to ever inform him of this or return the instrument) and pours all of her emotions into her pieces.  
They are all small carvings that seem to depict elaborate murders. Mikkela is the elder by two minutes and the angrier one by a wide margin.

He often catches her busy at her work, knife in hand, sprinkled with shavings, her face suggesting that she will turn the knife on the first person who approaches her.  
Mikkel always approaches without fear.

He announces himself as he comes into the barn, the far left corner of which is her ‘artist’s studio’, by tripping over one of the farm dogs splayed out in the door-way for a nap.

“Son of a-”

“Swear jar!” hoots Mette- a fellow blonde and the fifth child at ten years old.

He flaps his calloused hands at her “Get out of here! Go bite somebody! Just get out of my hair for a second, you demon spawn!”  
This is one of the more affectionate dismissals Mikkel can give. Mikkel is often so harangued by his little siblings that by the time he can finally find it in his heart to shoo them off he is on the edge of a nervous break-down. Sometimes he just screams wordlessly and climbs underneath the bed. 

Most of the time he runs to the relative safety of Mikkela’s company and takes a nap on her.

Today Mikkela appears to be carving a deer in the act of mauling a bear to death with imagined claws, spines and a mace-like tail. The symbolism is not lost on Mikkel; Mikkela and their father have recently fought over whether or not the twins should be allowed to leave the country next spring, when they will turn nineteen, to find jobs outside the farm. The argument is mostly between Mikkela and their father, with no clear winner yet. Though if the carving in her hands is anything to go by Mikkela is not ready to give up yet.

They greet each other wordlessly, in the way that twins do. Mikkel puts his back to hers and leans. Mikkela grunts in discomfort but does not shrug him off. 

“Mette still here?” she asks after a while.

Mikkel glances outside and sees Mette on all fours, running and keeping up with the pack of farm dogs that harassing a strayed sheep.  
“No, she’s outside.”

“So how are you Mr Mom?”

“Fine.”

“Inuk told me that Oline tried to suckle you at dinner.”

She did.   
Mikkel has fallen into the habit of taking over the early years of childhood from his mother after they’re born, except for the feeding. He does this both because his father needs the time to work on the farm and direct the farmhands (and coerce his children-helpers into doing their chores) and because he has raised almost every kid since Inunnguaq, he is slightly afraid his mother might ruin one if she is allowed to try her hand at baby-rearing. After all the three children she was allowed to care for turned out kind of weird. Mikkel eats his emotions and Mikkela spends most of her time in the barn with a knife and a couple of logs for company, and Inuk still talks to an imaginary friend at age seventeen.

But coming back to the dinner, Oline has recently been put on the bottle so Mrs Madsen can go more than five hours without having to pull out a boob to cork a squalling mouth. Mikkel took over the feeding duties and thusly Oline has come to associate Mikkel with food.   
She must still have some memories of nursing, because at dinner time when Mikkel offered her a bottle, she pushed it away and pulled the collar of his shirt down in search of the alternative. Ingrid laughed so hard she fell off her chair backwards and had to be held for ten minutes before she’d stop crying. 

“You’d know that if you ever ate in the house.”

“I will when that stupid man will concede.”

Mikkela and their father cannot spend time in each other’s company anymore- not without screaming bloody murder at each other, at least, so Mikkela has self-exiled to the barn for meals as well. Mikkel makes her plate and has Mette run it down to her each evening. There is often a note tucked under the bread telling her not to be a stubborn ass.   
He can see the pile of notes stacked neatly in the corner of Mikkela’s corner. The same sentence, the same hand-writing, glaring at him a dozen times over from the corner.

“Kela?”

“What?” she blows shavings from the crook of the deer’s legs.

“I might stay.”

The blowing on the wood becomes a strangled honking. When Mikkela has recovered enough to speak and breathe normally, she picks a stray shaving from her tongue and says “Excuse me? You want to stay in Bornholm? Like, this place? Right here?” she raps the floor of the barn emphatically.

His voice is measured and patient “Yes. Consider this, Mikkela. Consider that we have six little siblings and a woman so incompetent when it comes to raising children that her maternal instincts should be registered as a dangerous weapon. She’s totally shit at kids. She’s a good person and all, but not with kids.”

“So that’s what you want to do with your life? Stop Mom from ruining Oline and Otto and Ingrid?”

He sighs “Somebody has to.”

“Let Inuk do it! He’s got at least two more years on the farm before it’s time for him to leave and-”

“And he still talks to Ms Puddles. Inuk can barely handle sitting down at the table for a family dinner. How do you think he’d deal with the kids? He’d try. He’d try very hard but he just doesn’t know how to do it. Who else but me knows how to hold down Mette just right so she doesn’t strain her neck when it’s time for vaccinations and the booster shots? And who’s going to keep Innunguaq from running away before he’s even fifteen? You know he’d be out of here on a ship or a military transport or whatever if it wasn’t for me keeping him from doing that. And Ingrid will feel like I’ve abandoned her-”

“Alright, alright, shut up! I get it! You’re Mr Mom.”

Mikkela sighs in much the same huge, defeated way Mikkel did only a moment before.  
For a long time they let a silence stretch out between them. In the yard, Mette howls with delight and mimics the dogs’ barking. In the house, Ingrid can be faintly heard singing to herself in the kitchen, at the top of her voice with absolutely no tune nor skill to speak of. And under her is Oline practicing her baby-babble, and what could be either Inuk or Innunguaq babbling encouragingly back to her. Otto must be hiding in a book somewhere. He cannot yet read but enjoys staring at the printed words and pretending he can.

At length, Mikkela speaks again “We’ve always been together.”

“I know.”

“In school. They made us pair up for all the activities and sports. We still share a room. Have you thought about how you’re going to be able to sleep without me in there too?”

“Peacefully, I imagine, without your thunder snoring.”

“Hey.”

“Alright. Fitfully, I’ll admit. I will miss you. But this isn’t a choice I’m making because I want to. I have to do this. I have to be here for the others. You know that.”

She nods, making the backs of their heads knock “I know. Do what you have to do.”

“It is what I have to do. You have to get out of here, I know that much. Don’t wait up for me. Just get out there and make the world yours.”

“They’re your thing.”

Mikkel watches Mette running back and forth across the yard, now at the head of the pack “The kids?”

“Yeah. Carving is mine. The kids are yours. I gotta say yours is a lot more constructive than mine.”

He shakes his head, and again, the backs of their heads collide “Ow, sorry. No, your thing is way more creative. Mine is…is a necessary thing.”

“You think it’s creative to imagine a murder-deer out of a log? No way. Anyone can do that. But you’re right about Mom. Not everyone has the patience to deal with six people relying on them for almost everything. Takes a lot of patience and imagination to get somebody through that. That’s actual creativity, you know? You’re like me. Taking the materials you’ve been given and doing your best to shape them into something. Maybe something better. Maybe something more beautiful than it was before. You’re creating things, Mikkel. Real things. Real people.”

Mikkel is silent.

Mikkela turns carefully, expecting Mikkel to hold himself up, but he falls straight into her lap. Dead asleep.

She groans in a mixture of sympathy and disgust “Sleep well, Mr Mom. You earned it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of an exploration of my small clutch of head-canons about Mikkel and his family. This was kind of fun to write, actually, and I expect to recycle these characters introduced here in later prompts and works.


	67. 79: Starvation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In his quest to feed his need for adventure, Reynir has to wonder how many other people he might have starved, or what other people might hunger for

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I stretch out a vague background metaphor of hunger for adventure to fill a prompt.

It amazes Reynir how much the world around him has changed. In only a matter of weeks as well, compared to the twenty blissfully and completely ignorant years he passed in Iceland. The most stimulating intellectual company out there were either wrapped in coats of wool or barked and licked his face every time he said hello. His parents were not much good for anything but providing comfort of the paternal or maternal nature, but he found as he grew older and increasingly independent that he needed this less and less.

What he needed was excitement. What he needed was something other than the rolling hills of his home. He needed something utterly and totally alien to him- with which he had no prior experience, except perhaps in his imagination, if he had conjured up some fantastical landscape which proved to be solid and buried out there somewhere in the Known and the Silent Worlds.

Sometimes the clear air in the fields grew so stifling he felt as if he might choke on his next breath. Sometimes he ran circles around his sheep (and often with a confused sheepdog at his heels, wondering why his human had decided to take over their job?) in frustration. The fact of the matter? He could traverse the entire length of Iceland sideways and long-ways, beat the same paths backwards, and he would never move an inch from where he was.

Except he did. One little slip from his older brother was all it took, and suddenly Reynir Árnason was unleashed upon the world.  
And, good gods, has he been a useless lump of hairy liability. It wasn’t so bad on the ship, where he could apply himself to simple tasks where his enthusiasm compensated for lack of experience. Peeling potatoes doesn’t take much military training to accomplish, unlike killing trolls in the wilds.

Yeah he’s not very good at that. He’s good at standing around while the others make themselves useful in the Silent World, and then back in the tank, as soon as the chores are finished his main function is mainly shedding. And the cat already does that for them.   
Even worse, Kitty has another purpose; troll detector! Reynir is literally less valuable to the mission than a stray cat Emil fished out of a flooded hole in a wall. Even worse? He robbed them of some of their carrots when he stowed away for what he was convinced was the beginning of a new life of excitement.

Turns out he was right. The excitement part, actually, is the only thing he was right about. The rest of it? He could not have predicted any of it.

It is thoughts of this nature that drive Reynir from the tank early in the morning, before even Sigrun has gotten up to start the two hundred push-ups she does every morning (and is now forcing Emil to do, usually while sitting on his back and insulting his mother to motivate him), and makes him drop miserably into the snow. For a moment, Reynir is tempted to lay there and let the snow cover him.  
Blot out his existence from the world in a giant drift of snow.

Surely it would be the noble thing to do. He is only a strain on the rations.   
Instead, Reynir flips onto his back and makes a snow-angel.

“You have very long arms.” notes Mikkel from the laundry line, where he’s hanging up the spare coats.

“I know,” says Reynir, frowning “I do. When I was just hitting puberty I couldn’t control where they went. I’d turn around and my arms would be two feet in front of me, destroying everything.”

Mikkel snorts “My brother was exactly like that when he was growing up.”

Reynir arches his back to look at Mikkel “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“Brothers. Three.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Why would I invent that? Three younger brothers. Inuk, Inunnguaq and Otto, in that order.”   
Reynir wonders if he imagines the hitch in Mikkel’s voice when he mentions the first name.

He glances at Mikkel’s face and surmises that he did not.  
He wonders which one died in Kastrup.

Mikkel knows what he wants to ask “Inuk died in Kastrup. He was freshly nineteen years old.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am as well. He was a brilliant boy. He would have gone very, very far in life.”

Reynir is unsure of what to say. Because Mikkel says nothing more, he decides he should not say anything else.

From the time when he was old enough to walk, Reynir has been aware of longing for more. And from the time he was put in charge of his own flock (nearly seven years ago now), Reynir has been aware of a desperate desire to leave Iceland and explore the outer reaches of the world. Starved for the adventure that surely awaited him in the outer world.  
Yet he has never considered that other people might long for the opposite. Less adventure. What is adventure these days?

It is leaving one’s home and going to kill the things which one day might knock down the front door to let themselves in. To help themselves to spouses and partners and siblings and children and friends. What is a frightening, much-longed for adventure for Reynir is merely a fulfilment of necessity and duty for many others.  
For the man who’s hanging up his laundry, remembering the ones he has buried. Reynir cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a brother. His two brothers have always formed the cornerstones of his world- and his two sisters, the edges of the sky. They have been his inspirations and his aspirations. They filled his little head with stories, an urge to travel as they had travelled, and finally that last burst of foolhardy courage which launched him from their homeland.

Mikkel probably never had a choice as to whether or not he was going to inspire his brother, Inuk, to become a soldier. Inuk probably had to do it to satisfy a demand, to satisfy himself that his siblings would be safe as long as he and Mikkel were on the front-lines.

Reynir looks back at Mikkel and sees a man surrounded by ghosts.

“Do you have sisters?”

Mikkel fixes a pair of patched-up trousers (probably Sigrun’s) to the line “Yes. I have Mikkela, Oline, Mette and Ingrid.”

“Mikkela?” repeats Reynir. If the mood were not so solemn, he would giggle.

“My twin. Our parents didn’t expect a girl along with a boy, so they had only prepared a boy’s name.”

“Hm. That’s a bit of a raw deal.”

“She thinks so too.”

He is relieved to hear that at least Mikkela is alive. But still, seven siblings? How many more of them have or will follow Inuk? What kind of nightmares must fill Mikkel’s head when he sleeps? One lost and six more that could die at any time.  
For the first time in a long time, Reynir wonders how his siblings are faring. They have always seemed so wildly competent and confident of their place in the world, and how they were going to maintain it.

If one of them died it would be like seeing a god drop from Asgard, dead, at his feet.

Reynir suddenly feels very, very silly to be lying in the snow. He finds he does not have the strength nor courage to stand. To loom over Mikkel and taunt him with his youth and the fact that he is alive, for all his idiocy, while Inuk is still mixed with the bodies that had to be abandoned in Kastrup.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, you said that already.”

“No…no I mean I’m sorry I’m here. I shouldn’t have done this. I shouldn’t be running around in the Silent World like it’s my playground. I should be back in Iceland with my sheep.”

By now, Mikkel has emptied the basket. He drops it on the front steps of the tank and fixes Reynir with a measured, cool look.  
Finally, he says “You miss your sheep?”

“No. I’ve never been more glad to be away from them, but it’s not right. It’s not right that I’m here…and so many people aren’t anymore.”

“Reynir, we live in a world that’s long since fallen to the dead. It is not a question of what is fair and what is not. It’s a question of chance. Almost anyone could make it in the Silent World if they have the right kind of preparation.” Mikkel puts his hands on his hips, looking remarkably like Reynir’s father “And there’s a select handful of lunatics who can survive in the Silent World without any kind of preparation at all. Don’t begrudge your luck, Reynir, enjoy it. Revel in it. When someone dies, these days all you can do is mourn. You may be sorry when you die and at no other point will you apologise to me, do you understand? You’re not a burden. You were a surprise, I’ll admit, but nothing else.”

Reynir thinks for a moment “That’s what my parents say.”

Unexpectedly, Mikkel snorts and bursts into laughter. He is doubled over by the time he manages “So you were an unplanned child as well?”

“Yep! Total accident.”

“There you go then. You’re a happy accident.”

And with that, Mikkel collects himself and goes back into the tank, taking the basket with him. Once he is out of sight Reynir stands and inspects the snow-angel he has made. A bit lumpy. And braided, of course.   
Then again, not everything can be planned and executed without flaw. And very rarely in real life. 

It might not be so bad that Reynir starved for adventure and found a way to feed himself. It might not be so bad that Reynir junked up a few plans along the way, because he has also added some to them, right? He has added another set of hands and eyes and an almost boundless eagerness to help that still has Sigrun shaking her head in wonderment at his energy. 

A hand falls on his head and ruffles his hair. As if just thinking of her has summoned her, Sigrun has appeared at his elbow. She takes one look at his snow-angel and grunts with disgust. Clearly, Reynir is not doing it the proper Viking way.

Sigrun lets herself fall flat in the snow on her front and swipes her limbs furiously through the snow. Reynir joins her, and within seconds they’re both laughing and rolling over to make a chain of them- a chain of weird, angry snow angels holding hands with a lumpy and vaguely braided shape.  
They are still going at it when Tuuri comes out of the tank, takes one look at what’s going on in the snow and proclaims that they are both lunatics. 

Reynir does not argue. Only a lunatic would think he could solve his problems by running away into a world of which he knows nothing. And only a supreme lunatic would find some way to make it work.


	68. 60: Rejection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somewhere in a modern-ish world, Reynir and his gender identity are having a frank talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally remembered I had actually filled this prompt before, so here it comes. This is fitting considering the giant conversation I just had over on the Headcanon thread about gender identity headcanons

Reynir wants to be a child again.

He may feel like one, wanting to stay home from college and work so he can make fort pillows, and act like one, chasing bubbles any time there are bubbles to be chased, and he may eat like one, with sugary bowls of cereal every morning, but for all intents and purposes, legally and societally, Reynir is an adult.  
And yet he still doesn’t know what to check on applications when they ask for his gender.

He has limited options: Male and Female. The two words are like giant walls, hemming him into a long and narrow aisle. There is no middle ground where he can feel safe and more loyal to how he feels.  
Who’s to say whether he is male or female? Sometimes it’s one thing. Sometimes it’s the other. A lot of the time, his gender seems to vacillate as it pleases. He wonders why it even matters occasionally, because he presents as male or not at all and wears clothes that don’t suggest much in the way of an unfashionable amount of femininity- no heels. Heels are the work of Satan for what they do to his arches.

Things were easier when he was a child. He could just tell his contemporaries: “I’m a boy today, but that might change.”  
And they would nod their little heads and ask what game they should play next.

These days, he is aware of the pressure on him. Pressure to conform. Pressure to explain how exactly he can be male one day and then nothing at all the next. Pressure to explain what in the hell ‘nothing at all’ is supposed to mean.

When the pressure gets on his back and makes itself especially known, which it does in cycles of about two months, Reynir retreats into his room, dressing in baggy sweaters, subsisting on a diet of only mashed potatoes and salted mandarins. If it weren’t for his room-mate, Reynir would spend much longer in these moments of plummeting self-esteem than he does.  
Lalli gets it. Lalli is gay. He also has something that is either mild autism or Asperger’s (Reynir can’t remember which), so he gets how it feels to have people look at you twice, and the second time, with disgust or alarm or even fear.

He will usually tolerate up to a week of this behaviour before he swings into action.

This time, he unscrews the door from its hinges on day four. The sudden flood of light is so unexpected that Reynir flings himself from his bed, hissing, and has crawled half-way under his bed to safety when Lalli seizes his ankles and drags him out.

“We’re going to a museum.”

“I don’t want to go to a museum!” retorts Reynir “I’ve got stuff to do in here!”

“You can’t just sit in your room watching ‘Gravity Falls’ all day.”

Reynir clutches the legs of his bed in a desperate and futile attempt to escape “The heck I can’t! Lemme go!”

Lalli does not. He drags Reynir out with one final, swift tug, and quickly puts him on his feet. Reynir tries to bite his hand but Lalli is too fast for him. He snatches a pillow from the messy bed and mashes it to Reynir’s face, preventing him from gnashing.

“Get showered and dressed,” he orders “Then you’re going to eat an omelette.”

“I don’t want an omelette.”

“This diet of salted fruit and pulverized potatoes has gone on long enough. You have ten minutes. Run fast.”

Reynir knows better than to argue. Lalli pulls no punches when it comes to improving Reynir’s mood. If there’s one thing Lalli hates to see second to anything else (the first being those frustrating scenes in movies where there’s food all over the table and no one is eating it) is watching someone stagnate in a bad mood when they don’t have to. Especially over the tough issues in life- identity and that big mess.  
And he is not gentle when it comes to pulling people out of their funks. Reynir remembers quite distinctly one infamous incident where he helped Tuuri, a cousin so close she might as well be a sister, get over a break up by hacking her locked door down with a fire-axe and spraying her with a water-gun until she ran from her room, shrieking and soaked, and out into the back yard and the sunlight for the first time in a full week.

While Reynir might not agree with his draconian methods, he sure can’t argue with Lalli’s results. The sheer anticipation of what his roommate has planned should he fail to comply chases him into the shower and back out again in record time. He washes his hair in under five minutes, which he has never done before, and settles for scrubbing sheafs of it between the folds of a towel instead of over-heating his hair-dryer.  
He throws on a pair of clean jeans, a shirt (one of the only ones that doesn’t have some kind of Batman-related slogan or logo) and a jacket, for good measure, leaving his hair down. It’ll dry as he walks. It’s going to make him look like a red bramble brush that gained sentience and locomotion at the same time.

On the bright side? The spectacle of his hair will divert people from trying to deduce his gender.

As promised, an omelette waits steaming on the kitchen table, with a tall glass of milk and a chopped apple. Lalli is nowhere to be seen. This means he must be in the pantry reporting his success. Their apartment is equipped with a landline, for some reason, and Lalli prefers privacy when he’s talking. So when he gets on the phone he takes it into the closet which doubles as the pantry and the linen closet.  
Reynir realises when he has stuffed half the omelette in his mouth (it feels so good and so strange to eat something which is not made out of potato or mandarin) that his friends are probably very worried about him.

Lalli is happy to let him have a certain amount of space. They live together, so sometimes getting space from each other is the preferred thing. But Emil and Tuuri? They miss him when he isn’t there. They notice.  
Reynir hasn’t seen them in a week. That’s just about long enough for Emil to find all of the long red, red hairs Reynir sheds wherever he sits for more than twenty minutes. That’s long enough for Tuuri to have missed him for their weekly horror-movie meet-up, which is a damned shame too, since they intended to watch ‘The Thing’ for the fiftieth time.

“I’ve been a bad friend.” muses Reynir aloud through a mouthful of egg.

“Damned straight!” comes the agreement from the pantry “Tuuri and Emil are coming too. I can’t stop them.”

“That’s fine,” says Reynir “I want to see them.”

He hears Lalli repeat what he has said, in Finnish, and then a tinny and muffled shriek on the other end of the connection. Tuuri, trumpeting her triumph.

They’re out the door in another ten minutes. Reynir feels the usual wave of nausea as his foot hits the street. Eyes on him, scraping over him, trying to make sense of him, becoming incensed when they cannot and he becomes offensive to them.  
It fades quickly enough, to be replaced with annoyance. What’s so hard to understand? He uses the male pronouns sometimes, then he does not. Why does that offend people? Why is what’s between his legs the most important thing about him? Why does it matter that he likes to dress in a way that is not male, female, but somewhere in between?

Who’s making up these stupid rules? 

Reynir is just in the middle of thinking how damned sassy he’s going to be the moment someone challenges him for the long hair (which a lot of people do; some people think a ‘man’ with long hair is something to be outraged by) when he notices Lalli is smiling.  
Lalli doesn’t really smile that much. It happens every now and again, like eclipses and the discovery of a living member of a species believed to be extinct.

“What?” he doesn’t mean to snap, but he does, already angry at the enemies he has imagined for himself.

“You have your face on.”

“What face?”

They pause to dodge around a young father with a double-decker stroller and a desperate look on his face. Reynir softens for a few seconds to smile at the twins peering out at him, all gummy grins and big eyes.

“What face?” he repeats.

Lalli shrugs “The ‘come at me’ face.”

“It’s so weird to hear you use pop-culture references.”

“Why?”

Reynir smiles again “I don’t know. It just is. Is it really that easy to tell when I’m worrying about my- you know? My stuff.”  
The term ‘gender’ has become an annoying one. Feels like a suit too tight and itchy to fit into comfortably.

“It is.”

Then, as if on cue, the moment they stop at the cross-walk to wait, Reynir feels a tug on the folds of his jacket.

He looks down at a girl, whose face is confused “Are you a princess?”

“Huh?”

“You got hair like a princess.”

Her mother notices and turns to Reynir, the apologetic smile plastered in place. It falters immediately when she sets eyes on him. He can see the questions crossing her face. Her lips twitch, but the little man turns green before she can voice a single one of them, and Reynir strides ahead. 

Behind him, he hears: “Mom that man was a princess.”

And: “That was a she, sweetie.”

“The hell it was.” he mutters under his breath.

Lalli pats him sympathetically on the arm- which is about as close to a hug as he will ever give.

“Normally I get farther from the damned front door before people start mis-gendering me.”

“They’re out for you today.” remarks Lalli.

Reynir doesn’t say another word until they reach the museum and it’s time to call their friends.

 

They get back to the apartment around ten o’clock at night. Reynir almost breaks his neck over the mail heaped in front of the door. The mailman has been by with bills, junk mail and a letter from Lalli’s older cousin.  
Reynir scoops up the remainder with a yawn and begins to leaf through it.

“Questionnaire! You want to do it?”

He hears Lalli scoff “No.”

Reynir settles down at the kitchen table with a pen and the paper. The day out has done something to improve his mood. He got to see fantastic art and listen to Emil critique the contemporary exhibits (“Everything looks like a selfie. If I want to see a stinking selfie, I’ll check my Instagram!”) and see Tuuri giggle every single time they encountered a sculpture piece where the more specific elements of the male anatomy had not been excluded.  
The world, though, seems to be out to ruin his good mood.

One of the first questions he reads is as follows:

‘Are you MALE or FEMALE? (circle correct option)’

After a moment’s thought, Reynir adds a third option.

‘I AM NEITHER AND YOU ARE CAVE-MEN FOR THINKING THOSE ARE THE ONLY TWO OPTIONS’

Lalli knows from the slightly demonic cackle that echoes from the kitchen that Reynir is going to be fine, for the next little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Supportive room-mate Lalli. Lalli's confused by social convention. In this verse he probably didn't even know there were different genders until he had the sex-ed class at school  
> ("Oh. So that's why Tuuri won't let me in the bathroom with her anymore.")


	69. 99: Solitude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri is worried Mikkel might be lonely during the summer. She needn't have worried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realised that I kinda of started a Madsen arc in two earlier prompts, so this is me finishing it, I guess?

Something a little bit sad occurs to Tuuri when they are on their last day of travelling.

Everyone is scattered over the modest hunting ship Trond somehow chartered to come and pick them up. Tuuri is torn between appreciating the absence of her team-mates and ruing the loneliness which fills the gaps where she is used to them being. While it is nice to be able to turn in an enclosed space without bumping face-first into an iron shoulder, or stretch her arms without smacking someone else in the face, it is also kind of disappointing. She has grown accustomed to having that bubble of warmth, security and obnoxious closeness around her.

Upon arriving in Mora she will step from one bubble to another- from her team to her family, and considering how much time Onni has spent hunched at the radio, waiting for news of their day, she doubts Onni will let her get very far for a while. Lalli’s going to have his safety and comfort too. Emil will return straight into the arms of his family, all very eager to see him and speak to him in the flesh. Reynir will go ahead to Iceland, where his entire family has apparently gathered to receive him.  
He has privately told Tuuri he’s afraid they’re going to lock him in the basement. Tuuri replied that he could use his new-found mage powers to bust out quick as a hot knife in butter. This made him feel better about going back to them.

Even Sigrun has her ‘Uncle’ Trond there to wait on her, though Tuuri is not sure if this is a blood relationship or an honorary title.

But Mikkel is alone. Mikkel has not mentioned a family or friends of any kind since they set out. The closest he has ever come to discussing his life in the Known World was comparing a guy he once dated to the one Sigrun was telling Emil about. He and Sigrun matched up so many similarities they eventually realised they were talking about the same man, and spent a few hours bashing this poor, needy guy.  
If all Mikkel has back in the Known World is a needy ex he shares with Sigrun, then Tuuri is surprised he’s going back at all. She would have made herself a cave in the Silent World, furnished it with books and supplies and waited patiently until the Tank rolled back in for the mission that has just been confirmed for next winter. But Mikkel does not have that option. He’ll have to go back to Bornholm, perhaps, a place which he hates so much that he shudders whenever anyone mentions the name.

He’ll just drift until next winter. He might not make it back to the next winter mission at all. This terrifying thought freezes Tuuri to the deck as she arrives in the fresh air. She has to grab the railings for support. Her legs are water and her stomach seems to be free-floating in her body, heading for the throat.  
She never once considered she might never get to see her friends again. What if the Västerströms decide to hire better staff next year? People with better training and track-records than her friends? They will most certainly have the money to do it. With the mission being such a huge success, other parties are getting interested for the first time. Those other parties will not allow rookie Cleansers and strange scouts and newbie, stow-away mages to run the next mission.

Maybe Sigrun will be allowed to stay on. After all, Sigrun has proved herself (surprisingly) to be the epitome of collected cool and competence when the situation demands it. Maybe Tuuri will be allowed to return- she bullied the Tank through the last weeks of the mission, dealing with engine fires and blown fuses…she proved herself.

But what about Mikkel? He’s done so much for the crew. He has been the rock, the sensible one when Sigrun couldn’t afford to be. He has been everything from a brother-figure to a father-figure and even occasionally the medic he was hired to be in the first place.  
But the evidence the Västerströms will use to judge whether or not Mikkel should come back next year will definitely be Mikkel’s actual medical performance.  
Tuuri rolls up the sleeve of her pants and looks at the stitches in her left leg, which she slashed wide open on a piece of jagged metal in the Silent World. No one will know Mikkel carried her all the way back to the Tank. No one will know he talked her through a major panic attack, then helped her check herself over for any sign of the Rash for days afterwards, though he knew there was no reason at all to panic. 

All they will know is her stitches could have been done with more success by a five-year-old with their eyes shut. 

For the first time since leaving Saimaa, Tuuri feels herself tearing up.

“Tuuri?” she hears behind her.

She turns to see Emil emerging from below-deck.

“Are you getting sea-sick too? I just took Lalli to the sick-bay for his sickness. I can take you too if you want. You really don’t look good.”

Tuuri flings herself at him and cries into his shoulder for a good twenty minutes. Emil, bless him, bears this without complaint. He pats her on the back and tells her she’ll be fine as soon as she has some water and a nap.

 

The rest of the trip is mostly uneventful. By their standards, anyway. A troll attacks once and everyone is forced to pitch in to help kill the thing. When Emil strikes the killing blow he also knocks himself over the side of the ship and has to be fished out before he dies of hypothermia. Later, Reynir goes missing. He is discovered five hours later asleep in some potatoes, and Sigrun berates him (via Mikkel as a translator) for not telling anyone about his tuber-nap. Kitty kills an unusually slow seagull and presents it to Lalli by dropping it on his face as he sleeps. 

By the time they have docked in Sweden, the most exciting moment was definitely the seagull.

“I’m never going near the ocean again.” says Lalli.

Tuuri stretches her arms over her head and sways slightly, unsure of her legs after so long on the water “We have another ferry trip. After we get back to Mora on the train we have to take the ferry back to Keuruu.”

He gives her a weird look “We’re going to Norway.”

Tuuri keeps forgetting “Oh yeah.”

“I thought you were excited.”

“I am excited.”

“No, you’re sad.”

“What’s with you this morning? I’m not sad. I’m just tired, ok? Go bother somebody else. Go say goodbye to Reynir or something.”

She shoos him off. More because she is alarmed that Lalli has actually picked up a social cue and scared he might figure out her problem entirely than because she wants to be alone.

Sighing, Tuuri drops onto a nearby and stares out at the docks. Her eyes immediately find Mikkel, of course, since she has been looking at him or else looking for him for the past few weeks. Tuuri cannot allow herself to accept this might be the last time she sees him. Nor can she reconcile the man in front of her- the vast, stoic man who’s become something like a best friend in the last few months- with the lonely, dull person he’s going to become.

Tuuri thinks about calling him over. It isn’t too late to convince him Dalsnes will be a better place for him than Bornholm. Sigrun would be beyond delighted to have her ‘bear Dane’ to keep her company in the long Norwegian summer. That would mean only Reynir is missing from their number, and who knows?  
Once the Icelandic mage academy has trained him up they might send him over to Sigrun to do his basic survival training. That’d be nice, to have Reynir around, though Tuuri knows that Lalli is going to relish the break from Reynir’s constant company even more.

She is about to call Mikkel over to start her long, tearful goodbye when a shrill screech splits the air. Her first instinct is to dive for cover. The only times she has heard a noise like that before all involve angry trolls. When the cry sounds for the second time and there is still no battle-cry from Sigrun (who would immediately charge into battle if there were a Rash beast of some description on the docks), Tuuri swallows her heart and peers over the edge of a crate.

A dash of black hair and white clothes leaps for Mikkel. Nonplussed, Mikkel opens his arms and catches it. The bundle swings around his waist like a hoop coming to rest, and a pair of small legs lock around his chest, a little pair of arms doing the same.  
Tuuri squints. A petite person with a lot of shiny black hair has wrapped their short limbs about Mikkel’s girth. They are making the same noise she heard earlier, except softer and more excited.

Tuuri straightens up and hears Mikkel say: “Care to tell me how you got out here?”

The voice that answers him is that of a young teenage girl, or a boy whose voice has yet to break “I came with everyone else of course!”

“Everyone else?” he repeats with a touch of despair “Oh, wonderful, you’re all here to welcome me, aren’t you?”

“You bet! Aren’t you happy to see me?”

For the first time in the half-year Tuuri has known him, Mikkel smiles. Like really, really smiles. He casts aside all concerns as to who might be watching and just smiles so wide his face seems to halve.

He grasps the girl around the waist and hefts her up, like a parent contemplating their infant “What do you think?”

They embrace. The girls’ face turns towards Tuuri. To her faint horror, Tuuri sees the girl has Mikkel’s nose. So apparently that thing is natural and in some kind of gene pool. Not, you know, a gift/curse from a god that was unique to Mikkel.

“Mikkel has a daughter?” she hears herself say, and quickly realises how ridiculous that is to assume.

No way is that girl his daughter. She is at least fourteen or fifteen years old, which would have made Mikkel a father at nineteen. Tuuri cannot imagine Mikkel as the type to have children so early in life. Or at all, considering he refers to children as ‘human larvae’ and tends to wrinkle his nose whenever they are discussed.

“Mikkel has a sister!” she concludes.

A very pretty little sister. The kind of supple-limbed, raven-haired slip of a girl Tuuri used to long to be, before she made peace with her own lovable girth and pear-shape. She’s also Greenlandic, by the look of her, but she looks a lot more Greenlandic than Mikkel. Tuuri only noticed Mikkel had something other than plain old Danish in his blood when she heard him cussing out a fallen log he had stubbed his foot on- in fluent Greenlandic, and only then did she also notice his eyes were almond-shaped, suggesting Inuit heritage somewhere up the family tree.  
Apparently there is now more than one Madsen.

And, she can barely believe her eyes, more than one Mikkel? At second glance this second Mikkel striding down the dock is actually a woman. A woman with longer and blonder hair, a softer jawline and more of her (still substantial) weight concentrated in the hips rather than the gut, where Mikkel’s collects despite the fact that he takes regular and rigorous exercise.  
It is like looking at Mikkel if he had been born a woman. Tuuri gets the feeling that is exactly what she is seeing. The woman is clearly the same age as him. 

And when she calls out “Hey, ‘Kel! I see you’re still as fat as ever!” she sounds the way Tuuri imagines a female Mikkel would sound.  
Perhaps a tad angrier and more indignant, the sound of it is definitely Mikkel-ish.

Surprisingly, Mikkel does not deck his doppelgänger for this slight. He slings the first girl under his arm and opens the free one to embrace his copy. She smiles his smile (though it is clearly a much more practiced expression on her face) and hugs him, hard.  
The girl under Mikkel’s arm squeals with delight.

“Miss me?” asks the woman.

“How can I? It felt like you were breathing down my neck the entire way. It’s hard to miss someone when your own face is their face- I saw you every morning when I shaved.”

“Mikkela, look, look! He has a new scar!”

The woman (Mikkela? Really? Even for twin names, that’s a bit cruel) tilts Mikkel’s head back by the chin to get a better look at the nick on his collarbone. The scratch was put there by a nasty fall Mikkel took through the ceiling of a concealed basement. Sigrun was mad at him because he fell a good dozen metres and the only scratch on him is the one Mikkela now scruntinises under his collar.

“Oline, ‘scar’ is incredibly generous. This is barely a scar. What did you do, sneeze while you were shaving?”

Mikkel rolls his eyes “Something like that.”

Oline and Mikkela. A baby sister and a twin sister. Tuuri glances about the docks, in search for any more surprise Madsens that might be popping up to greet their brother. She hardly has to look before she spots two men walking in stride- one very blond, the other shiny and black-haired like Oline.  
They have the nose. They have the smile, which only grow bigger as they see Mikkel. One of them calls his name and breaks into a run.

“Otto!” answers Mikkel, depositing Oline on the floor so he can receive his other sibling “Look at you! Running on that prosthetic already, you show-off!”

Otto is huge. Not as big as Mikkel is, but he’s only shy of that size by a few kilograms and centimetres. Mikkel is nearly engulfed by his embrace. 

“Oh man did we miss you.” the men break apart and hold each other at arm’s length. Otto’s face is wet with tears “I can’t believe you, you know. My kids had to be delivered by some stranger.”

“Well if you want me around to midwife than you better coordinate the next nibbling for the summer.”

They all fall about laughing. Oline too, although she doesn’t quite seem to get the joke.

The second man reaches Mikkel and gets a hug too. She catches a name she cannot begin to pronounce or even repeat inside her head. She is fairly certain it starts with an ‘I’, but that is all she caught.

Just when she has decided there can be no more Madsens in hiding, two women arrive from the opposite direction (both blonde) and embrace Mikkel as well. He has no less than six people hanging off of him. They are all at least a few years younger than him, so Mikkel must be the oldest or second oldest, after his twin.  
Each and every one of them has the unfortunate nose, and they are all smiling the same smile. They are all calling each other by nicknames or insults that double up as nicknames. They are all beyond delighted to see him and he is happier than Tuuri has seen him all winter.

Well, wherever Mikkel is going to end up this summer and the winter after it, at least he won’t have to while away his time in solitude.


	70. 51: Sport

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For some reason the folks are all on a small-town high-school baseball team.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in America, there's a lot of gung-ho sports all over the place. That is my excuse for this tiny-town high-school sports team puke here. Yay.

“Coming up to the pitcher’s mound is – oh, folks, we are in for a show tonight! It’s Västerström, who has not been allowed to pitch since the great Concussion Disaster of May earlier this year! Terrible accident, that, but we stood behind our favourite pitcher and we trusted the proper authorities to do their job. And they did and now our man is back where he belongs, on the pitcher’s mound! To those of you who were not present for the May Disaster or are having trouble remembering, Västerström pitched a ball that the other team’s batter missed with their bat and tried to hit with their teeth. I mean, honestly, what kind of a cockamamie player tries to save a strike by catching a ball with their teeth- oh, wait, folks, my co-host Ahmed’s telling me something…ok, apparently I’m not allowed to comment on the incident last May. Never mind! Good luck anyway, Västerström!”

Beneath the brim of his cap, Emil’s face is stop-sign red. 

“Don’t listen to them.” whispers Tuuri, underneath the short-stop’s gear “They’re just bantering. Nobody cares about what happened in May anymore.”

Emil punches the ball into his well-worn glove. His voice comes out in that low squeak that it sinks into when he is embarrassed enough to wish himself into a grave “Everyone cares about what happened in May. I almost killed a girl.”

“Yeah well she should have hit the ball or ducked.”

The roar in the stadium grows too loud to hear each other any longer, and then the batter steps in front of Tuuri and cuts off all opportunity for further conversation.  
Emil is about to set to tuning out the noise to prepare himself for the new inning, but the announcer is droning incessantly on.

“…if you look towards the dug-out you can see Coach Eide giving one of the players a pep-talk. I think that’s Hotakainen- one of the siblings of the famous Onni Hotakainen, who’s playing at a National level now and once carried this humble little high-school team all the way to Nationals. Ahmed, which one is that? I can’t ever remember which one of them is the girl and which is the boy- oh, Lalli? The skinny one is the boy?”

Now it’s Tuuri’s turn to go red in the face. She does not appreciate comments about her ample proportions, even if they are just simple observations that she is rather ample.

Emil cups his free hand around his mouth and shouts to her “Harness the rage!”

This causes the away-batter to turn and look at the colouring of the short-stop’s face. They inch away to the extreme edge of the home-plate and seem quite nervous about turning their back on Tuuri, who is in the perfect position to lunge and maybe bite out a kidney should she feel the urge. She may. It is difficult to predict what Tuuri might do when she is caught in a paroxysm of true anger.

“That’s Lalli Hotakainen in the dug-out with Coach Eide. He cut his hair last week. Personally I liked it longer and you can already see the poor boy’s getting a sun-burn on the back of his neck.”

 

Off to the side, Emil sees Coach Eide gesturing wildly. She’s summoning a player from out-field, who dashes back and past Emil. While they’re talking and the teams are growing more and more restless to begin playing again, Emil watches Lalli, who is leaning on the edge of the dug-out and yawning like a cat.  
There’s that familiar somersault sensation in his stomach, just to remind Emil of how desperate his crush on Lalli has become and how far out of reach he is. Should be a law against heterosexual boys being as damned cute and interesting as Lalli is, if only to spare the gay guys the pain of pining after them.

Emil looks away “Harness the rage.” he tells himself.

And then Lalli is passing his shoulder, on his way to replace the other player. He moves so fast he’s kind of just a blur of white-blond hair and striped uniform, and the words he mutters are almost unintelligible.  
But Emil hears it quite distinctly: “Good luck.”

His stomach preforms a few more acrobatic manoeuvres. Emil wonders if he might be about to puke on the mound. Instead, he busies his hands with pounding the ball into the glove. The gesture is so practiced it feels as natural as breathing. So will pitching, the moment he starts.  
For a quick moment, Emil allows himself the satisfaction of realising that he is back on his mound, back where he belongs, getting ready to toss a few of the meanest fast-balls in the nation.

“Alright and after a few last-minute adjustments by Coach Eide we are ready to go. I wonder why she put Hotakainen in? There’s already one on the field, but I have no idea where that other one went- oh, wait, the catcher. Oh, oh, here’s the wind-up!”

Emil cocks an arm back. He thinks of the girl from May and how her shocked face crumpled inwards around the ball.

“And here’s the pitch! Oh, direct hit! Pop-fly!”

The ball goes flying in narrow arc and, mercifully, drops right into the glove of the guy between third and second base. Reynir pulls this face like he cannot believe what just happened, and suddenly every player around him is jumping on him, thumping his back, bellowing congratulations down his ears. His cap is knocked off and the careful bun his volumes of red hair have been knotted up in comes spilling down.

Coach Eide’s shouts compete with the announcer’s excited gibberish: “Somebody get that man a hair-tie! Árnason, get your hair back up!”

“…absolutely amazing catch for Árnason, who’s also got some of the best hair I’ve ever seen. That kid won’t be balding prematurely, let me tell you that much! Ahmed remind me to ask that kid what kind of conditioner he uses.”

Coach Eide has by now hopped out of the dug-out and is on top of a plastic chair “ARNASON GET THOSE LOCKS UP OR CUT THEM OFF, LET’S MOVE, NEXT PLAY, MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!”

Emil turns for his next pitch. He tries not to think of the way the blood just kind of squirted out of her nose, like a tomato was being crushed in her sinuses, or the way she fell to the ground. She looked so dead.  
He closes his eyes. He thinks about how it feels to sit next to Lalli in English on those tiny desks, so their arms are squished together, and how infuriating it is to breathe air that smells like him without being able to say a word about how he feels.

And the next thing he knows, the fresh batter is screaming in frustration and Tuuri has rocked back on her heels in an effort to stay upright. The ball has slammed into her mitt with such force it really is all she can do to stay on the ground, as oppose to rolling across the ground helplessly.

“NICE ONE!” bellows Coach Eide, whose voice carries easily over the roaring crowd without any mechanical aid.

“Holy crap!” cries Tuuri “That’s more like it!” she flings the ball back to him, her grin sinister. 

Emil tries to hold the same image in his mind for the next pitch. He just about drilled a hole in the batter- and this is the last! If he can just strike this poor bastard out, then they will have won! 

“Harness the…the pining.” he whispers to himself “Harness the pining. Harness the longing. Turn it into pitch-power or something.”

“Ahmed, is Västerström praying? Perhaps saying some lucky words? A lucky incantation? When I was in sports way back in the old days I used to shout ‘Worcestershire sauce!’ before every game and I always did great.”

Emil assumes his stance and throws with all of his might. He throws so hard he almost knocks himself off the mound and has to throw his arms out to steady himself, as the other leg goes down and grounds him.  
A cry goes up from the stands.

The announcer’s words are accompanied by a noise that suggests they have upset their chair “WOW CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT FOLKS THAT MUST HAVE BEEN GOING A HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR! NASA WILL BE THINKING IT’S GOT A STRAY MISSILE DOWN HERE! Wow! What a pitch!”

Emil looks up and sees, with crushing embarrassment that he has bowled Tuuri right over. Her mitt is raised over her prone body in triumph.

He’s tempted to hop off the mound to right her, but she struggles upright before he can move. The look in her eyes is manic.

“KEEP IT UP VASTERSTROM!” shouts Coach Eide, who is now so excited that she is on top of the barriers between the field and the spectators “ONE MORE STRIKE! ONE MORE STRIKE AND WE WIN THIS MOTHER!”

“Oh jeez,” he breathes “Way to heap on the pressure, Coach.”

From behind him come the encouraging cries of his team-mates. He distinctly hears Reynir saying: “Come on Emil! One more pitch and we can win this!”

He risks a glance over his shoulder, just to see whether or not Reynir has put his hair up in case he does flub it and the fielders need to be prepared. Nope. In the place where Reynir’s voice comes from is a storm of red hair, at least waist-length, swirling in mighty sheafs that remind him of an octopus’s tentacles. A friendly red octopus is cheering him on; this thought boosts his spirits.

Then, beyond Reynir, there’s Lalli. He says nothing, but he is unmistakably looking right at Emil. He just nods. On his mouth is something which might be a smile. An encouraging one at that.

“Here’s the wind-up…”

And there goes the pitch. The batter flinches and ducks and the ball sails into Tuuri’s out-stretched hand.  
Half of the crowd jump up in a raucous cheer. The other half, the away team’s, slump in their seats and groan. 

Emil is about to offer some prayer of thanks to a god he doesn’t believe in when a shadow falls over him, and suddenly he’s wrapped in a bone-cracking hug and breathing a lot of red hair.

“You did it!” Reynir says over and over again “Oh my gosh! You did it! You totally did it! I knew you could do it! You’re awesome!”

Then both of them are off the ground as Coach Eide appears out of nowhere and wraps them in a giant bear-hug. She lifts them up and swings them around, seemingly unaware that she’s got Reynir as well as Emil, though Reynir’s hair whips about like a small tornado. The noise issuing from her mouth is closer to a warrior’s battle cry than a coach’s victory cry.

Tuuri reaches them next and just kind of hops in small circles, wary of Reynir’s hair. “We won! We won! Suck on that, away team!” she screams.

“And I did it without concussing anyone!” cries Emil.

 

Towards the back of the field, Lalli watches the team swarming Emil. 

“He did it,” says Lalli in wonderment “Without concussing anyone. I win the bet.”

Tuuri owes him five bucks and a Coke.

He wonders if he should join the team. Not because he wants to be close to the rest of them- a bunch of other sweaty bodies pressing in around him in a cacophony is the last thing he wants or needs to deal with. The screaming crowd already has him nervous. Better to wait for them to break out of the jovial, celebratory knot and then go over and say something encouraging to Emil.

Or not. Maybe never look at Emil again, because when Emil looked at him before the last pitch, it was all Lalli could do not to turn and vomit all over the field. Emil does things to Lalli’s stomach which an ordinary human being should not be able to do to an organ with a single glance.

Stripping off his catcher’s mitt, Lalli looks to the ground and mutters “There should be a law against hetero guys being so cute.”


	71. 71: Obsession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli is not obsessed. He's just checking on Emil's barrow to make sure he's ok, ok? And he would like his luonto to stop saying otherwise because it's incredibly obnoxious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh the chapter number and the prompt match up, excellent. So I'm back from a long sickness and a chest infection and I am now better thanks to modern medicine and relentless care from my family and present the reading audience with a small essay that mostly involves Lalli arguing with his luonto.  
> This follows the continuity of that one previous prompt where Emil was sleeping in a barrow for some reason. And there's going to be another prompt that follows it up, to end this kind of triology thingie?

It does not take a genius to figure out Emil is very pretty.

That is the way Tuuri phrases it. Bluntly, unconcerned about the words she chooses. In a way her usual and frustrating lack of finesse is also relieving; Lalli knows from the way she just kind of throws the comment out on day in the depths of the Silent World’s winter that he has no need to worry about any form of competition from her.  
Honestly, he is incredibly surprised Tuuri is not interested in Emil. In Keuruu she jumped from relationship to relationship in a way that reminded Lalli of a flea changing dogs every few weeks. Through no fault of her own, of course, since people were always going in and out of Keuruu. Also through a fault of her own, though, because Tuuri can be a really awful person to live with, so Lalli shudders to think what her various boyfriends and girlfriends have endured. 

But coming back to the problem at hand; as Tuuri so eloquently surmised, Emil is the kind of beautiful that needs no cultural context to appreciate, nor an eye practiced in locating the most beautiful features, or any real kind of experience with beauty. When one looks at him one knows they are looking at a beautiful person.  
It is some fortunate combination of an even set of features, a rich and textured colour in the eyes and the hair that are universally appreciated. Each part of his face and body are clearly exactly where they are meant to go. Emil’s beauty is one that gives both the impression of being effortless and being earned. Sometimes he looks like he was designed as the pet project of a nature god with dull hands and an itch to form an aesthetically perfect human. Sometimes he looks like a work of art that has had to take the chisel to itself and chip out every single, solitary detail, then polish whatever it found underneath the surface. Even his scars and blemishes and deliberate and gracefully so.

Lalli often wonders which it is.

More often he wishes he had the language to phrase this, as his Swedish is only fledgling at the moment. Besides that, he is not sure he would be able to summon a single word of what he wants to tell Emil even if he had them planned in his head.   
Lalli has never been good with spoken communication. He’s better at the kind where the words come from eyes and the body and can leap across gaps in language and culture that would otherwise put an insurmountable rift between two people.

Even though Lalli has made a kind of peace with this (more of an uneasy truce), he finds he cannot stop himself from making at least two trips every week back to the burial mound where he has found Emil asleep. 

The word is ‘barrow’. Emil is asleep in the kind of thing kings would have been buried in on one of the old, dead islands- Brighton, or Brexit, he can’t remember the name, but he knows there used to be a lot of people there, so the entire island is probably a waste of trolls by this point.   
Tuuri was chattering in his ear with a book in her lap. He happened to glance over and see a glimpse of something very much like what Emil uses as his lodgings in the dreamscape, and lunged into Tuuri’s lap in his effort to stop the pages turning. She was bewildered by his sudden and violent interest in the picture but translated the word all the same. He ignored her needling questions and left the Tank to think about it. He crawled underneath the Tank, imagining its oily belly was the roof of the earthen barrow, and tried to put himself in Emil’s shoes. Presently he was joined by Reynir. He must have thought they were doing some magey ritual, because he waved his fingers majestically until Lalli had reached his limit and had to tunnel an escape.

He cannot for the life of him figure out why Emil has been so lovingly arranged (and thoroughly armed) in a barrow meant for the dead kings of a dead island.   
Whatever the true purpose of the barrow might be, Lalli rarely feels comfortable in its presence. Each time he checks on Emil the urge to bundle his friend up and out of there is stronger. Someday, he may do exactly that, and who knows what the consequences will be?

With these thoughts on his mind all the way through the day, it seems inevitable to Lalli that he will have to go and look in on Emil again. How can he not? His friend is lying in an armoury and yet completely defenceless should he be attacked. If Emil were a mage, he might be able to draw his haven closer to Lalli’s for protection.  
Then again if Emil were a mage he would be up and running around, armed to the teeth, the way he is apparently meant to be. 

Finding Emil’s haven is an easy process by now. He leaves a note for Reynir (painstakingly spelled in pebbles and twigs, because he cares and has no paper) on the bank of his own haven to keep Reynir from wandering in search of him. He takes the same path across the gorge, which grows quicker every time. The distance between his space and Emil’s is shrinking. Lalli isn’t sure why. He only knows that it would be refreshing to have another neighbour apart from Onni or Reynir, even if said new neighbour is catatonic and distractingly beautiful.

The only problem with the trip is the anxiety. Each time Lalli manages to convince himself there’s something awful in Emil’s barrow. That he will find nothing but a few strewn body parts and meet only a horrific beast, with a muzzle wet from his friend’s blood.  
He does all of this internally, but because his luonto is literally a projection of his insides, his luonto feels the need to narrate this.

“Alright,” says Lynx reasonably, in spite of the manic glint in his eye (it is a he. Lalli asked) “I know you told me it’s going to be the same as it ever was over there, but just suppose it isn’t?”

They are midway through the woods by now and Lalli has never wanted to hurt himself so badly. He wonders if it is even possible to punch one’s own soul in the face. If it is, he will do it gladly.

Dodging around a playful red spirit that tries to coil around his ankles, Lalli takes a deep breath to prevent himself from biting Lynx instead of talking “You always say that.”

“Like Onni says, ‘I’m wrong about what I’m afraid will happen until it does happen and then I’m right and also dead’.”

“That excuse kept him in Keuruu for most of our life. You really want to follow his personal philosophies?”

Lalli did not know lynxes could frown. His can and does it quite well. In a way that looks disturbingly like the face Lalli catches himself pulling every now and again.  
“Well Onni’s been right about most things so far.”

Lalli has to give him that “Yes, he has.”

“The thing about yellow snow.”

“Ok, he was right about that.”

“And how to stop a nosebleed.”

“Yes but that’s practical advice. Common sense.”

Lynx snorts. This is a very feline gesture which Lalli does not ever remember making “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snort. It’s just that you put us into the same context as something common and normal. You do know we’re a really, really strange, right? Even by the Silent World’s standards we are just- I’m looking for a strong word to capture us. We are so strange.”

“Offensively strange?” suggests Lalli, ducking a low-hanging branch.

“Yes that’ll do. We’re offensively strange. I would point out that you are quite literally talking to yourself. This is normal for mages, of course, but usually people have these deep conversations with other people. Not the manifestations of their own souls. Personalities. Themselves.”

Lalli squints at Lynx “I’m not nearly so sarcastic.”

“You barely know what sarcasm is. To understand sarcasm is to understand the social norms you’re criticising and or subverting.”

“I don’t know why the deepest parts of myself sounds so snooty.”

Lynx rolls his eyes- his eyes are his own, not Lalli’s. They are black and round and completely animal. It makes it easier to look at Lynx. A little less dizzying. A little less like staring into a mirror that shows him what Lalli would look like if he were a big cat.

“I am the summation of all your- our knowledge, that’s why. You do absorb quite a bit you know. You’re actually very smart, but a bit too autistic to know what to do with those smarts. Tragic.”

Lalli frowns at him “Must you?”

“What?”

“Don’t we have enough image issues already without this? Self-deprecation? One part of me- of us- telling me or us that I’m too weird to exist and I should give up on human interaction while a lot of the world’s already done that for me.”

“Oh, boo-hoo. Why don’t I play you a sad song on a little violin? Oh, wait, I have paws! And no violin!”

“What is wrong with you today?”

“What do you mean what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me is exactly what is wrong with you, so you should ask yourself that question.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“No, you’re not making sense! I’m your train of thought with a tail on! So if I’m not making sense then it’s your fault.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“You’re right. We are offensively strange. I am, I mean. Who in Lempo’s unholy name apart from us –me- would get into a verbal fencing match with their own soul? I bet Reynir never has this problem.”

“Are we comparing ourselves to Reynir now? You know another problem Reynir never has? A surplus of friends because he’s so annoying. Neither do we- you- but that’s a choice because you hate people as a rule.”

Lalli stops and claps his hands over his ears “Please, stop. You’re giving me a headache.”

Lynx turns over him in the air. The look on his face is somewhere between contempt and pity “Oh, Lalli. You poor thing. I love you, I really do, but sometimes I wish I hadn’t come back.”

“Jerk.”

“Anti-social weirdo.”

“Masochistic cat.”

“Love-sick kitten.”

That one hits Lalli right in the chest. He glares up at the cat, cutting neat circles over his head.

“If I- we- were a meaner person,” he says thickly “I swear to the little gods, I would grab you by the tail, swing you around my head and throw you into Tuonela.”

Lynx snorts again “Please. You throw like a geriatric. You couldn’t get me from here to Bornholm, let alone the end of the mortal world.”

“Why don’t I try anyway?”

What might turn out to be the first actual physical altercation Lalli and Lynx have ever had (and possibly the only time in Finnish magical history that someone has attempted to beat some manners into their own soul) is swiftly interrupted by a noise that unites them both in a moment of shared dread.  
A bark. 

“Oh gods.” mutters Lalli.

“They found us?” Lynx materialises at his side and loops his tail around Lalli’s arm for comfort “How did they find us? Reynir can’t find his own toothbrush in the mornings but he can somehow track one measly mage across the wilds of the spirit world?”

The truly disturbing thing is that the bark has come from the way they are headed. Reynir and his luonto, a dog creatively called Dog, are where Lalli and Lynx will have to go if they are going to be able to check on Emil. Up ahead is a bottle-neck of sorts; they have to pass the mountain, which slopes upwards all the way to Asgard (at least that’s what they assume; why else would there be a near-constant thunderstorm shrouding the peak?), and below the slope falls into a field where Sigrun sleeps. The area also suffers from an intense infestation of wayward and demented ghosts.

Once, at Sable’s request, Lalli went to go look at Sigrun (Sable was worried her sleeping position was going to give her a crick in the neck). He came back in awe of her and bleeding lightly from the few dozen scratches the ghosts managed to give him before he got away from them. Obviously, the ghosts are too afraid of Sigrun to attack her, but not so of Lalli.

If he tries to avoid Reynir then he has to choose between invading the Asgardian territory and possibly invoking the wrath of gods that are not his, who will not take kindly to a little foreign mage sneaking around their lands. Probably. Lalli assumes the Asgardian pantheon is xenophobic because he has never had an experience with one of their monsters or spirits that did not involve him getting injured.  
On the other hand, he could stray into the ghosts’ territory. The only way to get through that place unscathed is by carrying Sigrun with him as a dozing meat shield. She kicks in her sleep. She bites too. Lalli would almost rather fight the ghosts than sleep-fighting Sigrun again.

“So really our only choice is Reynir and Dog.” surmises Lynx “Well, to Lempo with this. I vote we wake up.”

“I want to check on Emil.”

“You always want to check on Emil.”

“Well I’m going to do it now.”

“You’re obsessed.”

“I am not.” says Lalli firmly “I am concerned.”

“And in denial about being obsessed. Dangerous. That’s about two steps away from being a murdering stalker.”

“And I have a very unhelpful luonto,” he takes a deep, steadying breath “Let’s go and see what Reynir is doing here. It’s not safe for him to wander.”

“You sound like you ate Onni.”

Lalli wraps an arm around Lynx’s muzzle to shut it. Thankfully, Lynx does not protest. He has apparently run out of smart-ass comments to offer. 

As the barrow draws into view through the break in the trees, Reynir does too.  
His hair is unmistakable. Like a firebrand. Sometimes, when he sneaks up on Lalli (and, yes, it does shame Lalli that an amateur that is almost six and a half feet tall is able to sneak up on him, an experienced night-scout), the colour of his hair has Lalli mistaking him for an intelligent swathe of fire or a Valkyrie (who, according to the stereotypes, he understands are all busty red-heads with a taste for heroic and bloody men) for an instant.

But that is quite obviously Reynir. The moment Reynir catches sight of Lalli he starts to wave and bounce up and down on his heels. Dog dashes out of the barrow and circles Reynir’s legs in excitement, barking still in his excitement.

“Lalli! Lynx! Hi! I found this really weird thing! It’s full of weapons and-”

“Emil,” finishes Lalli “I know.”

Reynir raises an eyebrow “Emil?”

“Yeah that’s him in there.”

“Is that who’s sleeping in there? Oh. I didn’t know Emil was a mage.”

Lalli stops. A cold shiver crawls up his spine. It spreads across his skin and raises goose-bumps. Lynx suddenly feels very, very cold at his side- as if he is made of ice.

“What do you mean?”  
Yet Lalli already knows what he means.

He ducks past Reynir and into the barrow. The slab is empty. A scabbard lies discarded on the floor and one of the axes has been taken from the wall.

“Who was in here?” asks Reynir “You mean it was actually Emil? Like, our Emil?”

Lalli does not answer.

Reynir takes his silence as confirmation “Well I wonder where Emil went. It’s not like he could get very far. He’s pretty much-”

“Defenceless.” says Lalli.


	72. 64: Lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sigrun and Mikkel have a talk about loves past and present over some mead and try not to make a scene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another snapshot of my favourite bromance in action. I love these two so much.

It has been a long time since Sigrun has had a friend. Not the kind of friend one makes in passing or just because they speak to them, know them by name, and have a vague idea of how many children that person might have. The kind of friend one makes when they are young, their heart is stitched to their sleeve. The kind of friend one tells everything.

After hitting adulthood Sigrun did not expect to make a friend like this again. That variety of friend was reserved for the young, who had the energy to play the head-games and deal with the fierce affection that come with one of those. Furthermore, she doesn’t like getting close to people who are just going to die on her anyway.  
Proximity is the great friend-maker, after all, so if Sigrun was to open herself up to someone they would be another soldier in the immediate vicinity. People in her immediate vicinity die at a distressing rate. So, avoiding said distress requires some cold-heartedness on her part. She has convinced herself she cannot get close to others only to lose them to the Rash.

But that philosophy is difficult to follow when one is trapped in a small space with an incredibly dry, amusing and engaging guy that is actually interested in getting to know her too.  
It has been three more winters since Sigrun met Mikkel. Each new winter she spends tripping over his feet as she turns in the Tank and sleeping to the soundtrack of his occasional bouts of snoring, she is forced to recognise just how close she is to this man. Physically. Geographically. Emotionally.

Mikkel has been told things Sigrun did not even tell those long-lost friends she had as a teenager. He gets to hear about most of the menial things which happen in her life, including but not extending to her menstrual cycle (he knows enough about that, having as many sisters as he does), what she dreamed the other night, who is annoying her in her workplace, the weekend trips she is planning to take later on in the summer (he’ll be going on most of them) and, today, about her former relationships.

The word Mikkel uses is ‘lovers’, though he thinks of it as a crass one.

“It makes it sound like love is a verb,” he says over his flagon of mead “It sounds like it’s referring to the physical act rather than the emotional act.”

They are sitting opposite each other at a roughly-hewn table in a roughly-hewn bar. The night is one of those chilly Dalsnes spring nights, tasting like the winter’s left-over snow that will sprinkle the ground by tomorrow morning. They are sitting alone in their corner, but do not nearly have the bar to themselves.  
Over at the counter is a raucous party of eight who seem to be celebrating a stag party. At one of the tables is another even more raucous party of ten who seem to be celebrating a hen party. Aside from them, the handful of recognisable drunks Dalsnes passes, a few pairs of parents out for a night away from the kids, and a couple of pimple-cheeked, smugly grinning kids who look far too young to be legally in the bar. 

On the bright side, they can hear each other without having to shout.

“I just used the normal word for it,” says Sigrun, taking a sip from her half-drained flagon. Oh, nice. The brewer of this mead needs a pat on the back for a job well done “That was easiest for me. I haven’t had one in ages, though, a partner.”

“I know. I’ve been around for the last three years.”

Sigrun lets out a shallow, regretful sigh “Remember that guy from up the ports? I should have gotten with him. Like, actual relationship with him.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve been single for two years now, that’s why.”

“You weren’t all that attached to What’s-his-face during the first winter. You never said a word about him.” points out Mikkel civilly.

“Of course not. I told him I might die in the Silent World-”

He snorts “I doubt you believed it. I doubt you believed you were going to do anything but conquer the Silent World.”

She flaps a hand to silence him, but she’s smiling now “I told him I might die so he better go and find himself a new partner. He said he didn’t want to. Still, who in Hel’s blessed scary name is gonna wait around on a casual date-mate who might be going to her gory death when they could be chasing the honeys of Dalsnes?”

Mikkel pulls a face “Have you seen the women of Dalsnes?”

“What? We’re a damned attractive bunch.”

“But you’re all crazy.”

“What’s wrong with being crazy?”

“Nothing, I suppose, but I wouldn’t want to date crazy. Dalsnes women are always looking to their next troll kill. They’re all semi-psychotic and already married to their battle-axes.”

Sigrun narrows her eyes. Her smile turns mischievous “Better than being married to our cows, like Bornholm men.”

Mikkel lets out a low whistle “Low blow, Siggy. You’re very cruel to me.”

“Aw you deserve it you big galoot. I don’t know how you’re maintaining a solid relationship, being gone for months every year.”

He glances at the ring on his left hand “It’s called determination. Flexibility. Commitment.”

“It’s called dumb luck,” corrects Sigrun, taking swig this time, to turn the faint buzz at the base of her skull into a small roar and maybe drive off the menace of melancholy she can feel at the edge of her mood “Sakura is too pretty for you. Too good for you. Have you ever thought about that? She’s beautiful, she’s super-smart, she’s killed stuff with her teeth and she has a really good job with the government. If I were dating the woman, I’d lock her in a tower every winter to make sure she didn’t start shopping around for better options.”

“And that is why you’re still single.”

She sticks her tongue out at him.

“Besides,” Mikkel catches the light with the ring and flicks it into Sigrun’s eyes “She’s the one who proposed to me.”

“Bully for you. I still say she’s gonna dump your broad butt for some demigod.” she reaches over the table and pats Mikkel’s hand in the manner of a doctor comforting a patient “But don’t worry. When it happens, Sigrun will be there to help you pick up the pieces. Once she’s done laughing.”

“Quit that. It is so uncomfortable when you refer to yourself in third person.”

Across the room, a cry goes up from the stag party. One of the men has dipped another man against the counter and they are now sucking on each other’s faces in a way that recalls a barnacle sticking to the hull of a ship. The party around them are cheering and exchanging notes- winners collecting the earnings from the losers of some bet.  
The hen party cheers too.

“Take it off!” yells one of them.

Sigrun shudders “Yuck. Look at that. Eating each other’s faces. That’s disgusting.”

Mikkel nods solemnly “They’re rank amateurs. You can tell. The purpose of kissing is not to eat your partner’s lip, as the blond one seems to think.”

“Can you remember the last time you kissed like that?”

His face remains stubbornly blank, though Sigrun can tell from the drum of his fingertips on the table that he does not like the memories he is about to recount “In my twenty fifth summer, probably.”

Sigrun leans forward eagerly “Do tell.”

“What’s to tell? I was playing doctor for this isolated group working on a sentry tower a few miles outside the Danish border. There was nothing to do all day but report the trolls that went by and play the same damned card games over and over again. I was forced to seek alternative forms of entertainment.”

Grinning, Sigrun asks “What was their name?”

“His name. I don’t even remember. Mostly I just remember his torso. He had the most magnificent torso,” Mikkel traces out a muscular shape in the air with two hands “Those pecs were almost enough to make me want to believe in gods. In the craftsmanship of the human form.” 

“Is the torso all you remember?” prompts Sigrun with a sly look on her face.

Mikkel returns the sly look “I’m a taken man, Sigrun. It would be highly inappropriate of me to recount that sort of detail about my previous relationships.”

Sigrun lets out a bark of loud laughter that turns a few heads. Wiping a single hysterical tear from the corner of her eye, Sigrun sinks back into her seat, sighing “Gods, I remember the first time I went with someone just because they were hot. I used to be such a wimpy little girl. All I wanted from people was emotional validation. I needed a partner to tell me I was doing good all the time.”

He has heard this lament before “Your parents neglected to provide you with a fat head,” supplies Mikkel “So you had to supply it yourself.”

“Yeah. My teenage years were just this wreck of emotional drama. Ugh. First love, right?”

“Right.”

“My first love was this guy named Odd. I was seventeen years old, he was sixteen- this weird looking kid with a head shaped like a pumpkin.”

Mikkel snorts in mid-swig. There is a flurry of napkins and laughter for a moment as amber liquid drips from his nose.  
When he has recovered, eyes reddened, taking deep breaths, he manages to ask “And what did you see in him?”

Sigrun is also breathless from laughing “Sometimes- oh, gods- sometimes you gotta look past the shape of somebody’s head. He wrote the most breath-takingly bad poetry. I thought that was brave, you know? To be that much of a stereotype. I was a regular berserker with a troll-tooth necklace, and here’s this kid actually writing poetry about how he feels ostracised because he hasn’t grown a beard yet. How he was deprived of the symbols of manhood. Odd found all these social problems to put his fear into when there were literal monsters scratching at our walls every night. I thought it was so brave I can’t even tell you.”

“Was he your first?”

Her eyebrow cocks up at a sly angle “I’m not telling.”

“So no, then.”

“No, no, he wasn’t. I mostly just listened to him read his poetry. We were too shy to kiss or hold hands.”

“Good gracious. That sounds like an awful first love.”

“If you’ve got a better story I want to hear it.” she challenges.

The smug look on Mikkel’s face tells her he does “I do. It’s full of heartbreak and true love and hot boys.”

She slams her fist on the table, making their flagons jump and spit froth “Excellent!”

“It was Farouk.”

She lets out a groan of agony “Terrible! Ew! You’re telling me I dated your first love? Wait, wait, you’re telling me you actually loved that guy?”

“Well, young Mikkel was a very stressed out young man. I must remind you I was basically raising my own siblings single-handedly. I needed a refuge away from my family, and all ‘Kela did was sit in the barn and whittle murders out of logs.”

He stops to let Sigrun have another good roar. This one is so enthusiastic she nearly pitches herself backwards out of her chair and has to grab the edge of the table to save herself. The table screeches forward, prompting a few cries of protest from around the room.

Mikkel regards her with a mixture of affection and disgust “It wasn’t that funny.”

“Whittle!” she chirps “She whittled!”

“Yes she whittled. She was useless for emotional support when she was whittling, which was all the damn time. So I had to find someone to give that and I didn’t want it in a friendly way. I wanted love, right now, dammit.”

This sends Sigrun into fresh hysterics. Mikkel reaches over and hangs onto her shoulder so she won’t topple over.

“Are you done?” he asks after a moment.

Sigrun nods silently.

“So I found Farouk. It was a good thing for me he was desperate for love too. We went to school together. I suppose I fell in love with his dark eyes or his practiced air of gloom or some such stupid thing like that.”

“The practiced gloom! That’s what got me. I thought it was bravely stupid.”

“I’m seeing a pattern with you.”

“So what happened? You didn’t really tell me the story.”

“It was hard to talk in the barrel. Your elbow was in my mouth.” Mikkel shrugs his massive shoulder. His face does become thoughtful this time, but not in a troubled way. He looks back on his past as a series of painful curiosities, as if he were walking the halls of a museum to someone else’s troubles “What happened was we began to date at sixteen. We broke up at nineteen, when ‘Kela left for greener passages. He actually went with her. He said he was going to stick with the twin that was actually going to do things with her life.”

Sigrun sucks a breath in past her teeth “Gods. That’s rough. What did ‘Kela say?”

“Well she didn’t know it was revenge. She and Farouk were friends. She just thought he was coming along because he didn’t want to start out in the world on his own. I can tell you, when she found out he intended to win her heart to punish me, she was the farthest thing from happy there is.”

Sigrun’s brow knits “What do you mean?”

“I mean she almost acted out one of the scenes depicted in her carvings.”

Again, Sigrun reaches over and pats Mikkel’s hand. This is the only gesture of comfort she uses in public. If there are no strangers around to judge her, she might hug. Sigrun prefers gestures of reward like high-fives and back-slaps over those affectionate things, like hugs and kisses on the cheeks. They make her back teeth hurt.

“Hey.”

He raises his eyes to meet hers “What?”

“You’re gonna get married.”

His mouth bends into a small smile “I suppose I am.”

“And I’m gonna be the best man.”

“Best woman.”

“No, I wanna be referred to as ‘best man’. I’m gonna confuse people.”

Mikkel closes his hand over hers and squeezes “Alright, as you wish.”

If someone were to ask Sigrun what kind of closeness she would prefer, whether she wants the passion of her teenage years for a partner, or for a good friend, she knows exactly what answer she would give.  
She knows it beyond a shadow of doubt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mikkel had to make Sigrun his best-entity at the wedding because there were way too many siblings to choose from. Let's assume she gives the world's greatest speech at the reception  
> (And apparently wedding ceremonies are same-ish in the post-apocalypse?)


	73. 54: Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri finds a new hobby to distract her in the late hours of the evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt gave me so much trouble. I've been staring at this number for weeks, wondering what to do with it. This is weird use but I swear I'm just glad I found something to do with it that didn't relate to a Tangled spin-off.

The mission is well under way when Tuuri discovers a thrilling new hobby. An unexpected hobby. A revelation in the art of distracting oneself from boredom.

This discovery begins with a secondary, smaller epiphany. Reynir has a flat forehead. Of course it is domed like everyone else with a complete skull, but his is a little bit flatter on the front. Flat enough to facilitate the stacking of certain objects.   
He just mentions his flat forehead in casual conversation. It goes something like the following.

Tuuri: Onni used to say I was probably dropped on my head as a kid. That knocked all the magic out of me. Otherwise, I would be just as magey as the rest of my family. 

Reynir: Oh, I wonder if that’s why I’m a mage?

Tuuri: What?

Reynir: Apparently one of my older sisters accidentally dropped me when I was a baby. It wasn’t directly on the head or anything. But look, isn’t my forehead kind of…kind of flat at the front?

Tuuri: Oh. It is.

 

The second part of the revelation comes later that night. Tuuri lays in her bunk staring at the one above her, listening to Sigrun’s slow breathing and hating her for falling asleep so quickly. The late evenings are always so difficult to Tuuri. People are too tired to return to work after dinner. Everyone pretty much staggers to their bunks and collapse. Tuuri, on the other hand, is stuck with work which is the opposite of physically demanding. By the time the others are ready to collapse she is just getting ready to stretch the cramps out of her limbs and maybe take a good rigorous run to wake herself up.

But being the useless piece of non-immune, non-magical goof she is, she can’t go out on her own. She can’t so much as sneeze wrong in the Silent World without risking a painful death. So she is stuck lying awake in her bunk and wondering what the world might be like if she were not susceptible to the Rash.  
This night, however, Tuuri’s mind is elsewhere. 

Reynir has a flat forehead. Tuuri has a few little pebbles she stacks on her desk. She plays a game with herself; how high can her tower go before gravity reasserts itself?  
She looks along the room to where Reynir is sleeping. Just in front of the door. There is enough room between him and the closed door for someone to kneel, if they are careful. 

Tuuri rises. Her path is easy; Lalli is under Emil’s bunk as usual, tucked out of her way, and Kitty has gone to sleep under Mikkel’s chin like a breathing ginger beard.  
The real challenge is Sigrun. She has seen Sigrun bolt upright to investigate the tiny rasp of cloth made when Emil turns in his sleep. If Sigrun hears her creeping out of the room she will definitely wake up, probably mistake her for a daring troll and at least poke her with a knife in the kidneys before Sigrun realises it is just Tuuri. 

She makes it. Once in the office she is struck by the urge to do a silent victory dance. Well, why not? No one is around to watch her.

Tuuri dances. When she has finished dancing, she stoops over her desk and digs out a handful of pebbles. Back in Keuruu she used to play this game with pencils and pens. It was far more entertaining than her work. But now, her work is possibly the most exciting thing she has ever done (even if she is sequestered in the same room basically all day) and the stones are just something she remembers every now and then, if it occurs to her she has a spare moment.

They are all only marginally bigger than the nail of her thumb. Each one is flat and smooth, as thin as a page. Tuuri amuses herself for a moment by lodging a stone in front of each of her eyes and pretending to be a dead-eyed zombie. 

“What are you doing?”

She almost screams. Almost. Luckily, she recognises the voice before she recognises the need to scream.

“Lalli?” she puts out a hand and gropes in the air.

She finds his chin immediately and nearly stumbles into him. Lalli stiffens and steps back, helping her catch her balance.  
Even with the chips of stone shuttered in front of her eyes, Tuuri can feel the judgemental look burning into her.

“What are you doing?” he repeats in an undertone. Obviously he also knows the extreme dangers related to waking Sigrun up when she does not expect to be woken.

Tuuri removes the chips from her eyes. Lalli is pale and wan and sleepy and hates her for being awake at this hour when he should be safe under Emil’s bunk.  
“I can’t sleep.”

“Lay back down.”

“No I’m gonna do something else. Stay quiet, ok? Don’t wake up Sigrun.”

She creeps into the bunk room again. Resigned, Lalli trails behind her. He knows better than to try make her do anything when she does not want to. 

Kneeling beside Reynir, Tuuri beckons him over. He doesn’t listen. He instead creeps back under Emil’s bunk. His eyes glare out from the gloom under Emil’s bunk.   
Whatever. Let him stew in his own bitterness. 

Reynir is the picture of peace. His face is relaxed, his long arms folded over his stomach in the picture of repose- or of a corpse getting ready to be sent to Valhalla. Tuuri snaps her fingers over his nose. Reynir does not stir. Mercifully, neither does Sigrun.  
Tuuri plucks the first stone from her other fist and lays it carefully upon Reynir’s forehead. She waits for him to flinch at the cool of the stone. When he does not, she carefully places another on top of it. And another and another and another.

“You’re so weird.” whispers Lalli.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if this stays on his forehead until morning? He never moves in his sleep- when you aren’t there to be grabbed, I mean. Oh gods I hope he doesn’t move.”

 

Sigrun stirs around six in the morning. She has fallen into the habit of listening to the breathing of her team, checking they are all out, all healthy and all out of her way for at least the next fifteen minutes. Sigrun enjoys these first fifteen minutes. Her only time alone during the whole day. She enjoys her team, of course, but she also enjoys her own company and the relative quiet of such company.  
Once she is sure they are all solidly out, Sigrun sits up. Glancing over at Mikkel, she sees where Kitty spent the night. Mikkel should never ever grow a beard. It will look terrible with his chin.

She can’t see Lalli on the floor, so he must be under Emil’s bunk again. Cute. Yesterday morning she caught them holding hands in their sleep.   
Then Sigrun sees the weird thing. The really weird thing which, of course, would have to be on Reynir. A modest tower of paper-thin pebbles is stacked on his flat forehead. The tower is tall and straight and perfectly balanced. Underneath the tower, Reynir’s face is composed and peaceful. He must be having excellent dreams.

“What the…you know what? I don’t want to know.” decides Sigrun “I’m just going to go outside and stretch out and pray the rest of the day isn’t as weird.”

It may be her imagination, but she thinks she can hear Tuuri giggle faintly in the bunk beneath.


	74. 74: Are you challenging me?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As a new member joins the Hotakainen family, Onni suspects an owl of trying to usurp his position.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep. I don't really know where I meant to go with this one, but this is how it turned out.

Onni first notices the interloper in Lalli’s bedroom. 

The second winter has just ended. Lalli has come back with new scars, bad stitches up the length of one arm (Onni cried) and sheepishly introduced the blond pyromaniac as a boyfriend. Onni saw that coming. Emil is nice. Emil is very sweet for having made the effort to learn Finnish for Lalli- and has impressed Onni by actually managing to speak it competently.   
He’ll make a good Hotakainen.

These are most of the thoughts on Onni’s mind when he goes into Lalli’s bedroom (now Emil’s as well, for the next three weeks, until Dalsnes is satisfied they have recovered from their second Long Winter), in addition to the worry that he might find a stray drop of blood on the sheets. Emil’s wounds are substantial this year. Far worse than they were last year; he managed to come back with a cut halving his left eyebrow and nothing else.   
This year, he’s lost a pinky finger, has a few broken ribs and one cut on his back that won’t stop bleeding. Onni laid a spell on it the other day in hopes of coaxing the gash to close itself, but has had no success so far. Each day there are fresh traces. Just enough to notice. Like the sheets have some reason to blush, or a strawberry was squeezed lightly over the bed.

Onni is so busy searching Emil’s side of the bed for the tell-tale red he doesn’t notice the interloper on the windowsill at first.  
He only notices the breeze “Lalli! Quit leaving your window open!”

A grunt from the kitchen, to let him know Lalli has heard him and has no intention of listening to him.  
And a disgruntled yip to let him know he’s being too loud.

A yip.

Onni pauses.

Who in his family yips? Not Tuuri. Tuuri grunts too. Emil doesn’t make noises. He uses real words and facial expressions.   
It is then that Onni looks over to the windowsill and sees who has yipped. A giant owl, white and speckled with black and brown like a swathe of snow that has just been fouled by a flick of dirt from a nearby road. Amber eyes as big as his face. Breathtakingly beautiful. Also, in his damned house.

“Get out of it!” he snaps, flapping a hand at the owl.

To his horror the owl only regards his gesture with the cool, removed disgust of an arrogant lord surveying his kingdoms.  
No, not his kingdoms. Onni’s kingdoms! 

Onni picks up a pillow and waves it menacingly at the owl “Get your feathery butt out of my house this instant.”

Normally he likes nature. Welcomes it with open arms and maybe a bite or two of his lunch, if whatever animal companion that joins him asks nicely enough. But there’s something unmistakably smug about this owl. Onni knows from a single glance that the owl thinks it’s better than Onni. Onni does not appreciate that. This stupid owl doesn’t know him.  
This stupid owl doesn’t know what he has gone through to raise his family. What he had to do to keep them clothed and fed. What he had to tell himself to make himself leave the walls of Keuruu for the untamed wilds of Mora (too many horses and people). Heck, this owl doesn’t have the slightest inkling of how Onni had to stretch himself last winter and the winter just gone to help Lalli ward off spiritual attacks, and to keep Reynir from getting eaten from the inside-out by monsters of all description. 

All this owl knows is the windowsill is comfortable and the silly human is making a vain attempt to get it off.

“OUT.” roars Onni.

The owl makes a gesture that might be a snooty sniff, spreads a beautifully soft pair of wings, and flaps once, hard, and out of view. Silent as a cloud.

Emil has put his head around the door “Are you alright?”

Livid, Onni turns to face him “I hate owls.”

Emil frowns “Your luonto is an owl, isn’t it?”

“I hate that owl most of all.”

 

The little bastard turns up before the day is out. Onni is on his own, though, since his family is out. Tuuri got it in her head that Emil should get a better look at the place where the family he’s bound to join (Onni can smell it; there’s no way that Västerström is not becoming a Hotakainen in at least the next five years) has lived for the last part of their lives. Lalli had to go along to make sure Tuuri wasn’t going to traumatise him.  
So Onni is left alone with every room full of silence and the chairs at the table growing cold.

He tells himself he is glad of the moment to himself. What he thinks is how badly he wants to hug his family to him- both of them, and then a pat on the shoulder for Emil to avoid squeezing his weepy wound.  
Onni goes to his room to lay down. He’ll just sleep until the others get back, then pretend he was busy and engaged with his world before that.

Onni limps into his bedroom and lays on his side, facing his window. At his window the owl is framed, perched on the edge of the outside windowsill, staring at him with the most bold, crass, smug expression on its face. 

“You son of a-”   
All his aches forgotten, Onni springs upright. He seizes his pillow and beats it against the closed window. The owl squashes its head back into its neck. It does not move.

“Begone!” screeches Onni.

The owl squints smugly at him. 

What does this owl think? Does it think it has seen a fellow of its species whom it can jimmy out of its niche? This is Onni’s world. Onni earned this world. Onni furnished this world and this owl wants to chisel him out, claim his tiny kingdom and make Onni’s family its own family? Yes. This owl thinks it can. This owl thinks it can just rub its brilliance in Onni’s face and intimidate him right out of his place in the world.

The son of a-

“Are you challenging me for this place?” barks Onni, still swatting at the window with his pillow “You know you can’t do that? You can’t just replace me! We’re not even the same kind of owl! Lalli and Tuuri and Emil would notice if an actual stinking owl replaced me at the dinner table! You can’t shove me out of my world and take my place!”

To drive his point home, he lets out a wordless, ululating scream and bangs the pillow against the window with all his might. The noise is of a feather falling gently to the floor. Finally, either alarmed by Onni’s demeanour or the possibility that soft, soft pillow might meet its hollow bones if Onni ends up breaking the window, the owl spreads its impressive wings and glides into the grey sky.

The front door opens and Tuuri calls “Hey, what are you screaming about?”

“Nothing,” wheezes Onni “Nothing at all.”

 

The owl comes back four more times. Each time, Onni is alone in the room and at one point even the backyard. Each time he drives it away with harsh words and a few projectiles. Twice, Tuuri catches him celebrating his victory after the owl flees. Because this involves him screaming a few more choice curses, she gets a little worried.

Onni does not see any point in telling her. He has long-since accepted that his family think he is a first-class lunatic. That the things which he fears will happen to him or them are all in his imagination. Part of this is true, and part of it is not. He is worried there will be repeats of what happened previously. Tuuri and Lalli are too young to remember what happened in Saimaa- thank the gods, and they seemed to have blocked out what little would be available to their memories.

It’s an owl menacing his family. Not the slavering Giant which he knows will turn up on their doorstep someday, looking to absorb the last of the Hotakainens to complete the set. But still the thought of this owl harassing his family terrifies him.  
What if the owl does drive him out and assume his identity? Will they notice? Emil might be fooled; he has only known him for two and a half years. If an owl were to take Onni’s place it would not be all that different. The same grunts. The same wide-eyed, judgemental stares that follow people in and out of rooms. The same impeccable hearing. The same near-genocidal hate for mice.

Emil might not notice at all. And Lalli and Tuuri, what if they don’t care? What if they like the owl better than they like Onni as a head of the household?

The thought terrifies him.

“Can you hear what you’re thinking?” asks his reflection one morning.  
It is actually his luonto, who, rather than materialising at his side like normal luontos do, prefers to communicate by assuming control of their reflection.

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you can.” retorts his luonto, folding his arms in the reflection “Because you sound like a raving lunatic. You sound totally paranoid. You’re scaring me.”

“The owl. The owl knows us. The owl knows a part of me is an owl too. It thinks it can usurp me.”

Onni’s reflection cocks an eyebrow “It’s a fucking owl. What’s it gonna do? Steal into the house and start paying the bills before you can?”

Drying his face on a towel, Onni nods emphatically “Something like that. It doesn’t recognise me- us as a human, you understand? It thinks there’s a nice owl life waiting for it inside this house. I know that would never fly, but the owl doesn’t. The owl thinks it can roll on in and claim everything I have, family included.”

The reflection bites his lower lip “Yeah but that’s the owl. You seem to believe the same thing.”

“I don’t-”

Onni is interrupted by a knock on the door. There, in the crack between the jamb and the door is Emil, looking a little like he is afraid he might be murdered.  
But, bless him, he makes the effort to keep his voice even and measured “Do you have a moment?”

Onni looks at his reflection. His luonto makes a shooing gesture and mouths ‘we’ll finish this later’.  
He throws the towel over the sink to dry “Yes, I do. I was just, um, just…clearing a few things up with…with myself.”

Emil blinks “Ah. Ok. This- this might be a silly thing to say, but I’ve noticed something a little strange here.”

Onni has to stop himself from asking Emil what he thought he was going to notice when he got involved with a Hotakainen. Something normal?

When Onni does not interrupt him, Emil presses forwards, encouraged “There’s this owl that keeps staring in all the windows-”

He is cut off by Onni’s arms encircling him in a swift hug that produces an alarming crunch from his back. Emil continues with his face crushed into Onni’s chest “-and I know this is a strange thing to think about an animal, but I think it may have some ill intent.”

“Thank you.” rasps Onni.

“No problem.” says Emil “Um, I have no idea why you’re thanking me, but you’re welcome.”

“I thought I was going insane.”

“Me too. I mean, I genuinely thought I was being stalked by an owl-”

Onni releases him and holds him at arm’s length “You are. We all are. My owl is a luonto-”

“And the owl out there thinks it can usurp your place in the house because it thinks you’re completely owl,” finishes Emil with a tentative smile “I’m glad I’m onto something. I thought I was just going a little crazy.”

“What did you say?”

“About the owl?”

“About where the owl is.”

Emil points at the bathroom window “It’s right out there.”

Onni turns his head to the window. He does this without turning the rest of his body. There is a slight popping, raspy noise as the bones of his neck shuffle to comply with the ridiculous order. Emil thinks about asking if Onni has broken his neck, but refrains, in case it is a medical issue Onni is sensitive about.

“Begone.” says Onni.  
There is no need to thunder it. His will is firm, his menace clear. If the owl has any preservation instincts at all it will leave.

A tense moment passes between owl and owlish man. Emil stands, watching, wondering what went wrong with this family to make Tuuri the member who is closest to being normal. At length, a snowy swathe of wings is opened and the owl disappears from sight with a single, silent wingbeat. Onni lets out a growl of triumph.

Gently, Emil wiggles from his grasp and leaves Onni to stare triumphantly out of the bathroom window where his foe was vanquished.

As he goes, Emil whispers to himself: “Still nicer than my dad.”


	75. 85: Spiral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A discussion of Emil's swift down-hill spiral, as of his initiation into the ranks of the Cleansers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is some pretty heavy (and clumsy) character study. You might want to play a cheerful song in the background.

The shadows have grown long and heavy when Sigrun joins Emil on the windshield of the Tank. She hardly needs to hop to get a leg over the hood, and sends him scooting to the other half of the windshield as she gets to her feet effortlessly. Sigrun stands on the hood and shields her eyes against the sinking sun. Her jacket is tied around her waist. Her undershirt is tucked into her trousers so that her small chest is, for once, making itself known through the folds of her clothes.  
If Emil had any inclination whatsoever to crush on women he would crush on her right now. Still, even if he was anything resembling even slightly interested in women, it strikes him as a crass and crude notion, to have romantic affections for Sigrun. She seems so far above the bother that comes with cases of intense puppy-love. Especially from rookie subordinates.

“What are you doing?” he asks after a moment.

A logical assumption to make, from the fact that she is staring towards a distant city’s ruins, is that she is on the watch for trolls. But that’s what Emil is doing. And Sigrun is never logical if she can help it. Sigrun says logic knows its place in problem-solving and on the battlefield, but otherwise she would appreciate it if logic kept its snooty nose out of her business. 

She could be doing any number of things. Last night she stood on the roof of the Tank for forty minutes. When Mikkel finally asked her what in Hel’s unholy name she was doing up there she told him she was staring down a feral cat that was giving her a judgemental look from the nearby woods.

Sometimes she gets up on the Tank to pray. Unlike practically everything else she does, Sigrun’s praying is fairly tame. She crosses her legs and bows her head and is just silently at one with her makers. Then she’ll jump to her feet, rejuvenated, and suggest they go and find something huge and gooey and mean to kill.

After a moment she responds “I’m thinking.”

“Dangerous.”

She fixes him with an evil squint “You stop quoting Mikkel this instant or I’ll boot your pretty butt over the side of the Tank.”

Emil laughs and puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender “Sorry, sorry. What are you thinking about?”

“My first mission. That’s all I can think about today.” the tension goes out of her at once and she sinks down beside him, letting out a sigh that must weigh a few dozen kilograms “No idea why. It’s just on my mind like a part of a song you can’t get out of your head. You try to convince your head to play you another song, or at least a different part of the song, but all it’ll cough up are the same damn bars.” her head flops back onto the windshield with a resounding ‘conk’ “You know what I mean?”

“Sure. Sort of.”

“What I’m thinking about is this one particular part of my first mission. Oh my gods, it was a cluster-fuck. Did I ever tell you about it?”

Emil shakes his head. In fact he has heard the story in its entirety about five times, but Mikkel told him that it’s good when veterans share their traumatic memories, even if they forget they have already told the same story. He says it’s the mind’s way of cleansing the trauma. Think of it like a crab cleaning the sand on a beach, he said, and the brain is a little cleaner each time.  
Why don’t you ever talk about your trauma, Emil asked before he could stop himself, then said, no, don’t answer that I’m sorry that was a terrible question, and speed-walked away to berate himself in front of the bathroom mirror for ten minutes.

Frankly, with all that was going on during that exchange Emil is rather impressed he has remembered to pretend he has never heard the story of Sigrun’s first mission.

In the greying light, Sigrun looks a little older. She is a very young thirty-two. Her face is so free of age of any sort Emil kind of suspects she has lied about her age to progress more easily through the military ranks. But now, as she faces the sun sinking into the blanket of grey twilight settling over the Silent World, Emil would readily believe her if she told him she was fifty years old.

“It was a mess.” she opens the story with the exact same line each time “I mean, it was nearly a perfect mission. Almost nothing went wrong right up unto the moment everything went wrong.”

Emil feels the usual shiver shoot up his spine. Amazing he can hear this story so many times and still be find new ways to be terrified by each incarnation “What happened?”

She shrugs “I had a few mentors die on me. I got splashed by their blood. I just stood in the middle of this sudden attack from all sides and nothing touched me but the blood that went through the air. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Sounds like you were blessed.” says Emil with feeling. After the things he’s seen Lalli and Reynir do this winter, he has had to give in to the press of theism and admit to himself that there is probably a system of deities in place. Several systems. Something up there is facilitating the glow-ey lynx that follows Lalli around and putting flowers behind Reynir wherever he walks. 

For the first time in this cycle of stories, Sigrun looks at him. Usually she keeps her eyes on some vague point in the middle-distance to avoid making eye-contact. She’ll tear up every once in a while. The pain is not quite fresh, but she was so young when she experienced it. She cannot help but regress a little into that teenage girl that stood stock-still in the middle of carnage and walked away- unscathed and drenched in red.

Sigrun’s eyes are dry. They are bright in an alarming way that makes Emil want to crawl off the Tank and hide under the Tank for a few hours.

“What?” he manages.

“I have a feeling I’ve told you this before.”

Crap. She’s onto him “No.” he says innocently “I don’t think you have. A few bits, but not all the way through.”

Sigrun shrugs “Well there’s not much to tell. That’s basically it. I stood still and stayed silent and I was fine. But what about you? What about your first mission? You never talk about it.”

Biting his bottom lip, Emil considers his escape options. The aforementioned scramble underneath the Tank. He could say he needs the bathroom and barricade himself in there until dawn. He could try to change the subject, but that has about as much chance of working as Kitty has a chance of catching a hawk for her evening meal. 

Maybe it’s time he got the truth out of the way? His self-image has already taken a few poundings out here. He has already been broken and pasted back together a couple of times. What’s the harm in letting Sigrun see the scars in his psyche? She showed him hers without hesitation; at least, without the appearance of ever hesitating.

“They didn’t like me very much.” he says finally, decisively.

Sigrun frowns. Her eyes are still bright in a way Emil recognises from Lalli’s eyes. Sigrun sees something and wants to know what it’s all about and at the same time is wary of poking it in case it bites.  
So she gets out her stick and says, gently “I can’t imagine people not liking you.”

Emil raises an eyebrow “Really?”

She sighs from the corner of her mouth “Ok. I can. But they’ve got no excuses. You’re all kinds of useful and fun when you scrape past the layers of…” she waves a hand in the air as if she might be able to snatch the right word from it.

“Arrogance and wind-baggery?”

“No. Just-”

“Naivety and shocking ignorance?”

“Thor’s blushing bridal beard, kid, you don’t like yourself much either, do you?”

They stare at each other for a few long moments. He checks carefully, and there is no hint of sarcasm in her face. Sigrun really is incredulous that the Cleansers did not like him as much as she likes him.   
She checks his face too and she sees he’s telling the truth on some level. Not one of them, not so much as once, gave him a kind word. Sigrun itches for a Cleanser’s throat in one hand and her knife in the other. She’d quickly teach Emil’s entire cohort how to treat newbies. Precious, green-horned newbies like the one they were given and, as was evident from Emil’s training at the start of the winter, squandered.

At length, Emil speaks again “What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say that this,” she pokes him squarely in the chest “Is in exactly the right place.”

“What?”

“Your heart.”

“Oh.”

“Cheesy, I know.”

“I thought you were pointing to my lungs.”  
Sigrun snorts and thumps his shoulder with hers “What the Hel for?”

“I don’t know? I thought you were going to say they should have seen I have the right lungs for cardio.”

This time she has to laugh. Emil flinches back as Sigrun lets out a bark of loud laughter that bounces off the trees and up into the darkening sky. It occurs to him that he should do a quick scan for trolls, in case Sigrun’s mirth has started some stumbling their way. On the other hand with Sigrun here, what does he have to fear? Very little.   
He laughs along with her.

“Shut up!” calls Tuuri from the back of the Tank.

Her cry is completely ignored.

“You do have some pretty good lungs.” admits Sigrun.

“You spat a little.”

“What? Oh, yuck. Spit goatee.”

She feints to wipe it on him, then disposes of it in the most hygienic way (a quick swipe with a jacket sleeve) when he has cowered satisfactorily.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Emil blinks “No. I don’t want to, but I think I should. It’ll probably be good for me.”

“Probably.” confirms Sigrun.

“I just…I was just a stupid rich kid who wasn’t really rich anymore but I was still thinking that everything was going to be handed to me. You spend all of your childhood being told that you’re brilliant and you start to believe you are, and you wonder why you should even try like everyone else has to. I was like that. I wasn’t quiet about it at first, but I learned to shut up fast.”

Catching the disbelief on Sigrun’s face, Emil flushes a little and folds his knees up against his chest “I know, I know. I’m still a windbag. I’m trying.”

“No you’re not.”

“I am-”

“Not a windbag. Chill out, Blondie, you’re not a windbag. You just spend a lot of time with a foot in your mouth.”

He shrinks a little further in on himself with a grudging smile “Yeah. I had two feet in my mouth back in training with the Cleansers. All the time. And when everyone’s new, people are setting up hierarchies. Alphas get picked, then betas, then omegas, then those really gross people that are just too…too unspeakably annoying to go on the scale. That was me. I was at the bottom and stayed there the whole time. I…I kind of didn’t talk for maybe, one, one and a half years? No one talked to me, I mean, and the teachers knew I was one of the unspeakably gross-annoyings, so they didn’t ask me anything either. I just kind of stayed quiet and only talked to my family when I visited them.”

Sigrun tries very hard to reconcile this Emil, the ‘I-don’t-know-what’s-going-on-but-I’ll-act-like-I-do-so-I-don’t-look-like-a-moron’ Emil, to the image of the silent kid he has painted. She imagines him a few years younger, wan, morose, with-drawn, a voice hoarse from a lack of use. The two Emils circle each other in her mind for a few seconds. They just won’t come together.

He takes her silence as licence to continue “It wasn’t a fun few years. Eventually I realised I wasn’t there to be celebrated. I was there to get training to do a really dangerous job. Once I realised that I hoped things might be different. I mean, I always had good grades. I had literally nothing to do but study and train while other people were hanging out. So I thought if I put my grades together with just knowing that I wasn’t really a child anymore it might get a little better for me.”

“Did it?”

Emil picks nervously at the hem of his jacket “No. I graduated and then I was a Cleanser and it was the same. They used to call me ‘the Silent One’ because I didn’t say…I don’t know…more than five words a day. I was really close to going feral, I think.”

“What?”

“Feral? You know, like the kids who get raised by animals in the wild?”

“I’m just trying to get my head around the fact that you were in a super-close social setting, with all those other Cleansers around you…” she trials off.

They never tried with him. He thought it best to quit trying and hope the situation might rectify itself. It did not and Emil barely had the need to talk for several years.

Emil is clearly eager to get this over with, so he rushes the last part along “I was with the Cleansers until Aunt Siv told me Torbjörn was planning some fresh lunacy and they might need my help.”

“And now here you are.” surmises Sigrun.

He nods “Here I am.”

The sun has just about gone down. Perhaps two more minutes until it disappears to slumber on the dark and dead side of the world.   
Sigrun lays a hand on Emil’s shoulder.

“Glad you made it.”

He doesn’t look at her as he speaks “Yeah.”

“After a down-hill spiral like that, the only way is up.” 

“I could go subterranean.”

Sigrun punches him in the shoulder “I won’t let you, how does that sound? If you really start to suck that much I’ll get Mikkel to sit on you and squish all the mediocrity out.”

Emil’s frown slips “That may kill me.”

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“Or kills you later.”

“Or kills you later- yeah, ok smartass, how about we get off this Tank now? I don’t know about you, but my ass is so cold I’m not even sure it’s there anymore.”

He manages to flash Sigrun one proper smile before he slips over the edge of the Tank and lands softly in the darkness on the other side.


	76. 90: Triangle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Triangle as in three. As in there are three baby lynxes orphaned in the woods and Lalli decides he needs to do something about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, bit of a stretch. But a triangle is defined by the possession of three vertex, correct? Well what do you know! There are also three baby animals in this! Ha. Not a contrived response at all!

Dalsnes is a place unlike any other in the Known World. A place populated by soldiers, sailors, mages and warriors of all descriptions, varying in their levels of experience. New batches of warriors for the Known World are forever being trained. Dalsnes always has a surplus of over-excited rookies that annoy all of the seniors, so when one relatively new person rolls in who is not bounding about with puppyish enthusiasm, they tend to be noticed more than those who are actually excited to be doing what they are doing.

On Lalli’s first week in Dalsnes, five people pull Sigrun to the side to ask about him.

“Is it true he was raised in the wild by wolves?”

“No. He was raised by an owl-man.”

“Where did he come from?”

“Finland.”

“I heard he killed a troll with his teeth this winter.”

“That was me.”

“Does he really summon storms to do his bidding?”

“No. What jackass told you that? He’s a normal mage with normal mage powers.”

“If I make a move on him will he reject me?”

“Of course he’s going to reject you. Have you been paying attention at all? Have you not noticed how much he hates people?”

Sigrun does not actually mind fielding these questions; better that she deal with them than Lalli, who would despise the over-dose of attention from strangers. His Swedish has gotten shockingly good in the few months he’s been working at it, but probably not good enough to understand the whacky things people will ask him.  
Besides, Sigrun has really grown to like him, and with that comes the desire to protect the precious bundle of bitterness from every pain the world could possibly present him. It’s almost a watch-dog’s instinct. Each time she notices something headed their way that might distress him she wants to toss a blanket over him and hide him in the nearest closet.

This is partly because they are currently alone on the Dalsnes base. Well, obviously there are a few thousand other people here.   
They are alone in the sense that Emil is visiting Mora for two weeks to check up on his family, Tuuri went back to Finland with Onni to help Onni pack up and move out to Mora (Sigrun is still not sure exactly what his new job entails; she is just impressed to see Onni leaving his house of his own free will), Mikkel is hanging out with his enormous family on the farm in Bornholm and Reynir is not going to be free from the Icelandic mage academy until it is time for work experience at the end of the year.

So it is just Sigrun and Lalli. They are getting along surprisingly well. Lalli doesn’t seem to mind her company as much anymore, since Sigrun has figured out exactly what kind of human contact Lalli is willing to put up with. Not much. It has to come in sparing doses as well. However, the restraint she exercises when resisting the urge to smack him on the back is well-rewarded, by simple things, like the times he’ll come back in from scouting and just sit beside her while she does her sentry-duty, saying nothing, sharing a bottle of water, sometimes falling asleep beside her.  
Sigrun is pleased. She does not know why she is so damned please to have won him over, but she is incredibly pleased.

She is even more pleased when Lalli comes to her with a problem one late afternoon. If someone were to ask her later why she had felt actual freaking pride, like she had just downed a massive troll in front of her parents, she would have drawn a blank. All Sigrun knows is that Lalli is really starting to trust her and she feels on some level that she has earned that.

Sigrun is cleaning her knife when Lalli materialises out of nowhere and says “I have a problem.”

She barely jumps. She is almost completely used to his sudden appearances by now. Sigrun looks up, concerned, and lays a bloody rag to the side “What kind of problem? Do you need me to knock some heads? Is the bathroom door stuck again? Did that racoon come back?”

He shakes his head “It’s in the woods.”

“Oh. Do I need to bring a shovel?”

He gives her a blank look- blanker than normal.

She draws a little closer and whispers from the corner of her mouth “You know, are we burying a body?”

“Oh my gods.”

“Who is it? Did someone try to pull something on you?” an unexpected bolt of fury rips through her at the thought of one of those infatuated idiots trying something on Lalli- that would be like trying to talk a bird into trimming its own feathers to prevent it from flying “Who do I kill?”

He lays a hand on her shoulder to shut her up “No, it’s not like that.”

Relaxing, Sigrun pops an arm around his shoulder and gives him a quick one-armed hug “Ok. Good. Now what the Hel’s the problem?”

Lalli wriggles out of her grasp “I think I need to show you.”

 

Although it nearly kills her to stay quiet for so long, Sigrun agrees not to ask any more questions until they reach the woods. When they have gone for about half a kilometre and Lalli turns to her, signalling that she may open her mouth, Sigrun has to stop herself from screaming in relief.

“What’s going on?” 

He claps a hand over her mouth “Quiet.”

Sigrun groans.

“Just keep your voice down. They are sleeping.”

“Who’s they?” she stage-whispers.

He points around the trunk of a tree into a little clearing. In that clearing is the opening of a den, fuzzy around the edges from grasses and feathers that line it. 

“What am I looking at?” whispers Sigrun loudly.

“Wait a moment.”

It takes less than a moment for the first little face to pop out of the den. A tawny face emerges from the gloom inside and pauses at the mouth of the den, scenting the air. The little animal lets out a mewl. To Sigrun’s surprise, the mewl gets a kind of low growling noise in response. And it comes out of Lalli’s mouth.  
At the sound of the growl the little animal lollops clumsily and joyfully out of its den. A baby cat. A large baby cat, already much bigger than Kitty back on the base, who has just reached her adolescence. A lynx cub. Bringing up the rear are two more cubs. They are so excited to be in the open air the second practically scrambles over the back of the first, and the third turns a few circles in the spring grass. 

“What the fuck?” asks Sigrun.

“They’re already six months old. They should be just getting born. The Rash…when it comes, it makes animals sick.”

“Yeah I know that. Are you saying their mother got sick and now you’re the god-mom or something?”

Lalli frowns at her. He wasn’t finished explaining himself “Sick. I mean…I mean act weird. It makes animals act weird. Breed out of season. Their mother should have just had them. But she and the male near here must have smelled the Rash coming and reacted weirdly. It’s like what it does to the weather. Remember the monsoon?”

“Yeah I remember the monsoon in the middle of the Danish winter, Lals, you don’t forget a thing like that.”

They each fall silent. There is something mesmerising about animals at play. Especially little ones with faces still fringed with downy baby fur and paws they cannot yet keep balance on and a brightness in their eyes that is so similar to the curiosity in a human toddler’s eyes, the two species have nearly no distinction when the little animal discovers something new and interesting to investigate.   
And then there’s the distracting resemblance between Lalli and the cubs chasing stray leaves in the clearing. When one of them gets an unexpected nip from its sibling, the fur on the back of its neck stiffens. Sigrun would swear on a holy saga that she has seen Lalli’s hair do something similar whenever Mikkel mentions the possibility of the crew needing shots. A cub rolls from all-fours to its back and up again, barely missing a beat. Sigrun has seen Lalli do this from two feet with the exact same feline flare, though his is a neat adult movement, not a chubby, messy kitten version. And when the littlest lynx finds a stray sunbeam to stretch out in, Sigrun does not even have to strain her memory to recall the last time she saw Lalli do that.

At length, Sigrun says “Lalli.”

“Hmm?”

“Are you a lynx?”

“A little bit.”

“How much of you is a lynx?”

“My luonto.”

“That invisible animal that does your bidding and scratches the legs of the table in the great hall?”

“Yes.”

“Nice.”

A few more minutes pass. The biggest cub tries to scale a tree. Its siblings gather at the base to cheer it on, and are not quick enough to spare themselves from being squashed when their sibling slips about two feet up and comes sliding down the trunk.

“Lalli.”

“Hmm.”

“Where’s the mother?”

“Dead.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. I found her body a few weeks ago.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. She was dead with blood on her mouth. I was going to leave until Lynx told me he could hear babies crying.”

“Lynx?”

“My luonto.”

“Ah. Creative.”

“He named himself.”

A little while later, the cubs suddenly stop their play. They each look towards the opposite end of the clearing to where Sigrun and Lalli lurk. Nothing is there. As one, the cubs charge the other end of the clearing. To Sigrun’s surprise, the cubs actually seem to bowl something over. One of them goes flying as if it has just tumbled over a much larger animal. The other two stand a little ways off the ground as if they have just climbed on top of the same larger animal, and lick furiously at what seems to be the open air.

At the same time, Lalli’s face grows grim and determined. Sigrun recognises this face; Lalli trying to push his patience long enough to outlast physical contact.

“Lalli.”

“Hmm.”

“Is that your luonto over there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you taking care of these babies, Lalli?”

“All they need is food and to be taught how to hunt. They’re already off milk.”

“Can you actually keep your luonto so far away all the time?”

He shrugs “It’s not so far. All I have to do is hunt for them and make sure they’re asleep at the right times. Soon I’ll teach them their skills and then they will go and be grown-ups.”

Sigrun ruffles his hair “You do that. So, remind me, why is this a problem?”

“I want someone to know what’s going on. I might get a little exhausted. I might collapse. Don’t freak. Lynx will come back and I’ll be fine again.”

“Duly noted.”

“What?”

“Uh, gotcha.”

The solid patch of air named Lynx shrugs off the cubs and ushers them towards the mouth of the den again. One of the more recalcitrant cubs tries to get away and is lifted gently by the scruff of the neck. The cub does not seem to mind that it is hanging from the open air. It kicks its legs happily as it is schlepped back into the den and nudged after its siblings.

“What now?”

“Hunting.”

“Can Lynx do that?”

“Yes. It makes us tired, though.”

“Ok. Let me know if you need help. I could hunt a rabbit down and pass it off to Lynx if you’re having a rough day or something.”

Lalli nods thoughtfully “Thank you.”

“Thank you.” repeats Sigrun “For doing this. Us mammals gotta band together against the Rash, you know? If one of us is sick, then the rest of us can get sick. I mean I know they’re not human babies-”

“But they’re still orphans.” finishes Lalli. 

That is exactly what Sigrun was going to say. She bumps his shoulder with hers and smiles. After a long moment, Lalli returns the gesture. He even smiles a little.


	77. 94: Last hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Hotakainens are called on to do something that is neither comfortable nor advisable.

It is the summer once more when they are called in by the Council.

All three Hotakainens tend to attract stares when they are together, for the exotic silver hair and grey eyes and Tuuri’s loud laugh, but they are openly stared at as they enter the government building. Though Lalli is now twenty-three and has bettered his tolerance for human interactions, he still does not appreciate being stared at and shirks Onni like a shadow to a wall.   
Tuuri is not pleased either. She does not necessarily mind the attention (she likes it when she is recognised as a member of the Long Winter missions, of course, and basks in the glory a little bit each time someone identifies her as such). What troubles her is that they have all been called in abruptly and were not told the other two would be coming as well until they all met in the lobby at the same time.

Onni had shut a book in his lap when he saw his cousin lope into the building and waved him over.

“What’s this about?” asked Lalli the moment he was with Onni.

“I was hoping you would know.”

Then Tuuri traipsed in and it became apparent something unsavoury was going on.  
Onni has had time to think and has developed a fair idea of what they are going to be asked to do.

He has no intention of complying.

They are found in the lobby by a tired-looking secretary with only one eye, who points them down a long, grey hallway that looks more like a concrete alley than a piece of a building considered to be one of the best surviving specimens of old-world architecture. It looks like a place one might go to be robbed and murdered. At the end is a dark wooden door, which looks like the door to a place one might go to be tortured to death by a sociopath.

“I don’t like this.” says Tuuri in an under-tone.

“Me either. Stay close, both of you.” orders Onni “Hey! Lalli, stop stepping on the back of my shoes. Not that close.”

Ominously, the door swings open before Onni has a chance to knock. Inside is a woman with salt-and-pepper hair, worry-lines clasping her eyes so that they always appear to be half-closed. She wears the blue uniform of government high-ups and is hunched over a typewriter, making disparaging noises at the keys.  
Physically, she is beautiful, but Onni cannot remember ever seeing a woman who looked so unattractive to him. It reminds him of Saimaa. Of the soldier that turned up on his doorstep one day to tell him their mother was dead. Up to that moment Onni had thought him quite handsome, but when he unloaded his foul news on Onni, it made him unspeakably ugly. The news of their mother’s death leaked out of the corner of a clenched jaw, the eyes would not fix on him but instead wandered in the sockets like blind fish.

When the woman finally looks up from her typewriter she looks nearly identical to the soldier from Saimaa.

“Is this all of you?”

“Yes.” says Onni curtly.

Her brow furrows, creating the effect of a landslide of flesh that threatens to engulf her thinning eyebrows completely “Where is the third one?”

Lalli steps out from Onni’s shadow to fix the woman with a stare that is somewhere between cautious and irritated. 

“May we ask what this is about?” says Tuuri in her most polite tone. Onni knows it as the tone of voice she used to get out of trouble when she had started a fight at school or stolen something at home.

Onni blurts it before the ghastly woman can “You want us to go back to Saimaa, is that right?”

He can almost hear Lalli’s heart stop. Tuuri lets out soft version of the kind of cry a small rodent might let out at the moment of its death in the talons of a predatory bird.

The woman frowns more deeply. One eyebrow is lost under the furrow “How did you know? Has someone leaked the details of the mission to you?”

“Why else would the three of us be here? We’re the only survivors of the attack on Mikkeli who are in the military. I know exactly how many other people got out- there were only a dozen of us out of the three hundred and those other people are all private citizens. Something has gone wrong with some stupid attempt to reclaim the overrun village and you want us to accompany the next team to make use of our local knowledge.”

The woman is blinking rapidly by the time he has finished. She has no idea how to react him. Meanwhile, Tuuri has clutched his arm in an effort to keep herself from falling over. Lalli’s eyes are on the ground. His arms are crossed over his chest.

Finally, she thinks of something to say “There are incredibly valuable resources in Mikkeli that are just rotting. You are, of course, aware that the town hall of the village doubled as an armoury since Year Fifty-four? There are pieces of experimental technology and biology in the labs beneath the hall that could very well turn the tide of the war.”

Unexpectedly, Lalli speaks up “Do you know for sure the labs haven’t been broken open?”

“No, but-”

“Because you haven’t been able to get a unit near the town hall.” guesses Lalli. His eyes are still aimed stubbornly at the legs of the woman’s desk. 

“Well, no, the infected population is dense-”

“Densely made up of giants.” adds Tuuri “There’s nothing but giants down there. I know. I saw them forming. I saw the Rash sucking up people who had no business being affected by the Rash, then I heard them scream for help.”

“Stop, Tuuri.” Onni lays a hand on Lalli’s shoulder to find he is trembling slightly “They know.”

But Tuuri isn’t finished “And since you know so damn much about Mikkeli then I guess you know those giants out there still scream. I know. I hear them in my nightmares. I know for sure that they’re still screaming, except not for help, not anymore. They’re screaming for the rest of their families to come and join them in the Rash. If we go back there that’s what’s going to happen to us. We’ll be eaten by the same giant that ate our family- that’s made out of our family- and we’ll never be heard from again.”

Lalli shrugs Onni’s hand off gently and leaves the room. He closes the door silently behind him.

Tuuri is too mad to call him back. She just stares at the woman, now sweating and plainly uncomfortable. Wiping her eyes furiously on the back of her sleeve, Tuuri looks beseechingly to Onni.

“Tell her, Onni. Tell her to leave it alone.”

“She’s right. The more personnel you send there the bigger the giants will get. That is the only thing you can count on happening. No new weapons. No cure. Just larger giants.”

“I’m gonna get Lalli.” she rasps. She does not exactly slam the door, but she does not close it gently either.

This leaves Onni and the woman alone. The scent of ink and the woman’s flop sweat mingle unpleasantly. Onni feels as if his lungs have been tied off with twine. He can’t breathe except in short, shallow and faint wheezes that sound like the asthma attacks he used to have as a child.

“I was hoping you would be more reasonable about this.” says the woman at length. 

“You’re asking us to go back to the place where we lost everything.”

“Plenty of people do. Your friend- Madsen, the medic. I hear he is back in Kastrup helping the second reclamation effort.”

“Yeah, but that’s him, isn’t it? He saw it when he was an adult. He saw it with training behind him and he got to leave the place and go home to his family. We were children. We had nothing but luck on our side.”

Another pregnant silence hangs between them. In the hall, Onni can hear a soft exchange. Either Tuuri comforting Lalli or the other way around. Perhaps they are both comforting each other.

“I won’t do it.” he says “They won’t do it. Even if they change their minds, which they won’t, I won’t let them do it.”

“You realise you three may be the Known World’s last hope for ever turning the tides of this war? The technology in those labs could save us all.”

Onni takes a step backwards towards the door “Or it could do nothing. It could kill all three of us and do absolutely nothing.” 

“The last hope.” repeats the woman emphatically.

Onni pushes the door open “If we are the last hope of the Known World, then the Known World is already dead.”

He lets the door slam behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, Council. If you're going to secretly call in each Hotakainen you could at least meet them in person rather than just foisting them onto a hapless paper-pusher who has no idea how to talk people into things.


	78. 82: Can you hear me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the middle of a terrible battle, Mikkel and Tuuri have a long and loud conversation about bacon-stealing cats.

“They call it Mikkeli’s Paradigm. It’s when there’s an occasion in public defence where anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and very badly. I was there when the event that coined the term was happening. Mikkeli’s Paradigm isn’t something you want to be in the middle of.”

“It’s a shame we are!” shouts Mikkel over the bass rumble of yet another explosion “It’s remarkable I’ve never heard of the term, what, with it being so close to my own name.”

“I didn’t really know what Kastrup’s Law meant until now.”

“Don’t you think it’s rather…well, blasted unfair that our crew alone contains two people who had to witness the greatest civilian protection cock-up in history, and another that had to sit through the greatest military tits-up in history as well?”

“Yeah. Very unfair. Doesn’t do us much good, though, shaking our fists at the gods. And quit saying that. No one’s supposed to know you were in Kastrup.”

Mikkel gestures around the still-smoking crater with his good hand “Pray tell, Tuuri, who the hell is going to hear me and scuttle off to spread the delicious scoop?”

“I’m just saying!”

“What did you say? I can’t hear you over the small Ragnarok happening over our heads.”

“Yes you can!”

“What?”

Another explosion. This one sends out a tongue of flame that rolls over the steep edge of their trench. Tuuri lets out a small scream and hides her face in Mikkel’s shoulder until the fierce slap of the heat has gone.

“Are we going to die?” she asks him, frankly, as if he has the answer written down somewhere.

He shrugs “I suppose we might. We are in the middle of a Mikkeli-Kastrup level fiasco right now.”

Tuuri scowls “Ugh, I can’t die yet! I’ve got too much left to read!”

The odds of their dying out here in this small piece of hell seems quite likely. Most of the other soldiers around at the time have been scattered dramatically in a few directions. Tuuri was only shielded from the force of the blast because of another soldier’s body being thrown into her and taking the brunt of it.  
Mikkel was well out of the way and had come over in answer to Tuuri’s frantic screams to get this guy off, off, off, now, off, oh gods, get him off me. No sooner than he had picked her up and checked her mask for cracks was there a sound that could have been an explosion or an enraged god roaring for blood. Mikkel did not wait to find out. He turned his back on the battlefield, tossed Tuuri over his shoulder and hopped into the freshly-made crater.

Now they are stranded. Tuuri’s front is covered in jellied soldier. Mikkel is pretty sure one of his ribs is broken, though he cannot figure out for the life of him how that might have happened. To their left is the battle to keep the perimeter from being breached. To their right is the battle to push back the trolls that have already breached that side of the perimeter. They are not quite in the middle of it. The direction is more tangential- almost coincidental. They are nearly out of danger, but just far enough into the battle that heavy arms whizz over their heads, screams come to them loud and clear.

At the moment there is really nothing to do but sit in this smoking crater and wait for the victory. If the trolls win, Tuuri has her rifle. Mikkel will shoot her first and himself second; they have agreed on this already, even if it was hard to convince Tuuri that Mikkel wanted to be the one to do the shooting out of a sense of big-brother like duty, and he did not think that being the shooter in a suicide pact was ‘man’s work’.  
Mikkela accused him of the very same thing at Kastrup. 

“Are we going to die?” asks Tuuri for perhaps the fifth time in two minute “I don’t want to die.”

Out of both fear and convenience, Tuuri is cowered into his side. Fear, because things are blowing up all over the place. Convenience, because whenever there is a shower of shrapnel, Mikkel’s bulk protects her and her mask, most importantly, from chipping. 

“Neither do I.”

“Do you think we’ll die?”

“Perhaps.”

“Can you please just say no? Can you please just tell me you think we’re gonna get through this alright?”

“Tuuri, did I ever tell you about the time I had to fight a cat for my breakfast?”

She lets out a frantic, high-pitched giggle that fogs up her mask “You’re trying to distract me but it won’t work!”

“She was a mean old bastard. As big as a runt puppy. We called her Grandma Cat. She tried to smother Mette when she was still in the crib by putting her huge, fat butt on her face, but thank the powers that be that I was one of those hover-big brothers. I plucked her up and threw her out the window.”

“Mette?”

“No, the cat, you imbecile.”

“That’s animal abuse.”

“To an animal which was trying to assassinate the new baby. Believe me, that bastard knew what it was doing.”

A troll’s shadow looms over the crater. A rifle crack has seen it off before the troll can slough into the crater and crush them both. When Tuuri tries to look up, Mikkel jerks the hood of her jacket down over her eyes.

“Hey!”

Mikkel looks up at the dead arm flung out, grasping at the lip of the crater. It came so close to pulling itself in at them. Frankly, it’s a damn miracle they have yet to have had an unwelcome guest.

Tuuri pries at his hands “Get off!”

“At any rate, from that day on Grandma had it out for me. Mother wouldn’t get rid of her- and by that I mean give her away to a neighbour, or send her off into the military to harness her killer instinct against trolls. Not euthanasia. Everyone deserves a second chance, even if they are psychotic cats attempting to smother children with their buns. I never gave Grandma a second chance at Mette or any of my other numerous baby siblings and I suppose she resented me for it,” Mikkel pauses while another explosion shakes them. Dirt spills into the crater. The arm which clutched at the crater’s edge tips over the side, ragged, still wrapped in a military uniform’s sleeve.

The arm slides to a neat stop beside Mikkel. He seizes it and tosses it over the other side of the crater before Tuuri has a chance to see it.

“She communicated her resentment by hissing at me every time she saw me. But this didn’t work, because I would hiss back. She tried to claw me, but I was too fast for her. I have a twin sister after all. That will hone your defensive reflexes like nothing else. Finally, one morning when I was about seventeen years old, she really stepped up her game. She jumped through the kitchen window and, bold as you like, waltzed up to my plate at the table and seized the bacon right off it.”

“Oh my gods.” Tuuri laughs.

“It was infuriating. She had gone a paw-step too far. You better believe I went right out the window after her and retrieved my bacon. I caught her in the barn. She hadn’t eaten a bite. All she was doing was looking smug and satisfied, then I showed up, scooped her up and pried the meat out of her mouth. I ate it one bite. I had to teach her a lesson, you understand.”

“That’s disgusting!”

“That is standing up for my own rights and I won’t have you tell me anything else.”

A troll peers over the side of the crater. Mikkel plucks Tuuri’s rifle off her shoulder.

She tries to lift her hood “What-”

In the practiced fashion of a seasoned big-brother, Mikkel takes her by the back of the head and forces her face to the ground where he scrubs it in dust and melted snow. With his free hand he plugs the troll between a set of dull and milky eyes. Thankfully it sags backwards and out of sight.

Tuuri punches him in the ribs. Mikkel considers shooting her. But he shouldn’t hate her; she has on way of knowing one of his ribs is busted. 

She straightens up, livid “What the fuck?”

“Sorry,” Mikkel wheezes “You had a piece of fluff on your nose. I couldn’t think of a better way to get it off.”

“Mikkel, are you ok?”

“I’m fine.” 

The rest of the battle follows in much the same way. Luckily for Mikkel, his job has required that he live a terrifying and entertaining life. There is no end to the stories he could tell Tuuri. He has only told her three others by the time the sounds of the carnage begin to taper off.  
The relief he feels is indescribable, when he hears Sigrun screaming over the decreasing cacophony: “LAST ONE KIDS, GIVE IT EVERYTHING YOU GOT!!”

Then a fiery boom and pieces of troll going everywhere like little stinking comets.

And : “EMIL! NOT THAT MUCH, YOU DOOF!”

“Are we safe?” asks Tuuri, after the last inhuman scream has finished.

“I would assume so.”

Peeling herself from his side, Tuuri stands and hobbles uncertainly to the far-side of the crater. She hefts herself over the edge with a surprising amount of upper-arm strength, just as Sigrun can be heard saying “…there are bodies I want to find them, now, and give them proper burials. Mikkel and Tuuri can’t stay out here rotting like a pair of-”

“Lalli!”

“Tuuri!”

A sound like a sapling being enveloped in a bear-hug, which, Mikkel decides, is exactly what happens when the elder Hotakainen hugs the youngest.

“Tuuri!” cries Emil “You’re alive!”

“Mikkel protected me the whole time- Mikkel? Where’d you go?”

“Still in the crater!” he calls back. His rib protests at the strain of shouting.

“Mikkel!” bellows Sigrun “Are you ok? Can you hear me?”

“People in Bornholm can hear you, Sig!”

“Stay where you are! I’m coming to get you!”

Mikkel leans his head back against the pitted wall of the crater and marvels that he did not die. Nor did Tuuri. What a stroke of luck. His ears are ringing something awful, his chest feels like it has been converted to a nest for some very angry hornets and he’s got little pieces of dead soldier all over him from hugging Tuuri close for the past few hours.  
But all in all? Not a bad day. Never a bad day when Mikkel gets through another battle intact.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suppose the interpretation of the prompt was a loose one; just Mikkel and Tuuri having to shout to hear each other over a tiny Ragnarok.


	79. 86: Seeing red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are the conventional ways of dodging death in the middle of battle, and there are Emil's ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Seeing red'- it's like when a bull sees a bit of red it just has to run at, except it's with trolls.

It is midway through a Saturday morning when Emil Västerström walks into a common room literally stuffed with trolls, with messy hair, a yawn at his lips and an apology behind that.

“Sorry guys. Whatever is in that pain medicine knocked me out. I couldn’t lift my limbs this morning when I woke up, so I ended up going back to sleep.”

His eyelids well below half-mast, Emil weaves through the trolls as casually as he would wade through the jostle of his colleagues. If he notices the distinct smell of Rash and death, he writes it off as a lingering strand of dream which has followed him into the half-woken world. He does not notice the sprays of blood everywhere, nor does he realise what he mistakes for a stray boot that nearly trips him (he catches himself on the back of a chair and curses in Finnish) is actually a severed arm, still grasping a knife.

Emil reaches around a troll, retrieves the jacket he left on the table last night, and shuffles back to his room.

“I’ll be back in a sec.” he promises, wiping sleep from his eyes.

The sound of his door slamming echoes in the silent room.

It is a little known fact that the trolls, too, make use of the same technique which has kept their human prey safe in the open. When trolls are taken suddenly by surprise or believe they have no chance of winning against a large opponent, they too will stand still and stay silent for the duration of the emergency.

Many of the trolls in the room have wreaked a large swathe of carnage and havoc to reach the common room. Indeed, most of them burst through a large hole in the far wall which Emil has completely failed to notice, in spite of being hit by a few of the icy breezes blowing through, but none of them quite knew what to do when confronted by such a bold, unafraid mortal.  
Many of the trolls’ heads are working in a slow, confused tandem as they grasp for the information to explain this. A couple of the fresher heads have stumbled across the emotion of surprise and shock, taken a step closer to their vanquished humanity, and begun to weep silently at the memory of what they have lost.

Emil continues getting ready behind his closed door. He changes quickly so as to spend as little time in the incredible draught as possible (someone must have forgotten to shut the window last night). Odd that the dorms are empty at this hour of the morning, on this day of the week. There are no drills on Saturday. Why did everyone else get up before him?  
There must have been something weird at the walls again. He is also pretty sure Sigrun gave strict instructions not to stir him, since he has developed a weird tick whereby he automatically punches anyone who tries to wake him up. It started in the Silent World, towards the end of the mission, and got to the point where he had to be woken with a prod from the broom to spare Mikkel’s solar plexus the damage.

That must be it.

By the time Emil has brushed his hair into a ponytail (a long one. He needs a haircut) and dressed himself, he is beginning to feel as if he has missed something. Something rather major. Scrutinising himself in the mirror as he brushes his teeth, Emil deduces it is nothing external.  
He just changed the bandages on his arm a moment ago. He’s buttoned and zipped into his uniform. He has a patrol later in the afternoon, but that is the extent of his duties until Monday.

So what could it be?

Emil opens the door to the common room, still thinking. Then he stops. He realises what has been bothering him.

 

Less than a quarter of a kilometre away, Sigrun Eide is doubled over in trenches that have not been used in her lifetime. The cacophony of battle all around her makes it exceedingly difficult to hear what is being shouted down her ear by the scared private beside her, but she is getting the gist. 

“So you’re telling me he isn’t among the dead?”

“No! I checked! He might be dead somewhere else, but I don’t think so! The last place anyone saw him was the dorms!”

“The dorms are completely over-run!”

“Then he’s there if he’s dead at all!”

Sigrun claps the kid on the shoulder. She needs to think about everything except the possibility of Emil lying broken and dead somewhere, all alone “How old are you?”

The kid swallows, their eyes wide in fear “Sixteen, sir.”

“Well get your ass off the battlefield. That’s too young to die.”

The kid nods and darts off along the trenches, weaving desperately through the others huddled, re-loading weapons, dragging the wounded to safety and trying to shove the trolls off the barbed-wire fence that tops the trenches.

“No joy?” that’s Mikkel, in her ear.

“None whatsoever. We can’t worry about him right now.”

Mikkel bumps her shoulder with his- the quickest way of comforting in this mess of blood and Rash “Emil will be fine. He’s a strong boy. He knows what he’s doing.”

Sigrun looks at him and says, as she plugs a groping troll between the eyes, quite frankly “He has no idea what he’s doing.”

 

Emil has no idea what to do.

They never covered situations such as this one in his training. Not the basic. Not the advanced. Not even in those weird hypothetical situations the veterans sit around and invent when they have nothing else to do with their slow mornings. So, like any good Västerström does in a time of extreme emotional distress, Emil acts without thinking.   
He bends at the knees, never taking his eyes off the trolls who do not look away from him either, and scoops up a discarded arm.

Holding it by the sleeve, he gives it a wiggle to make it appear more lifelike. A few of the smaller trolls start forward excitedly.

“When you throw a grenade,” said Sigrun on the new recruits first day of training with explosives “Throw it like you’ve got your baby in the other hand. You can either throw this grenade with all your might or throw your baby to the trolls, because if the grenade falls short, your baby will die anyway.”

No one ever captured the situation so vividly in the Cleanser training. Emil remembered listening to her lecturing the recruits with a shiver then, and he shivers now. He cocks an arm back and throws the arm with all of his considerable might. 

Even Emil’s supervisors in the Cleansers had to admit he had a good arm. He has thrown sticks of dynamites over the tops of tall trees before; it’s the one thing he has a natural knack for.  
And of course it would have to be one of those weirdly specific skills that is almost never useful. At the moment Emil is just grateful to whoever governs the random chance of creation that he was given this one natural ability.

At a speed roughly the same as if the arm had been fired out of a cannon, the arm whizzes without exception over every single head of every troll in the room and continues out through the gaping hole in the wall. Each head turns after it. As he predicted, only the littlest and dumbest are interested.   
Emil takes advantage of the turned heads and lunges forward, grabbing a troll about the size of a pony by the sinewy remains of its mane. He finds a foothold in the pony-troll’s soupy side and hangs on for dear life as it charges out of the hole and into the battle outside.

 

“…what I’m going to tell his family,” says Sigrun miserably through the pin in her teeth “’sorry guys, but I got your awesome kid killed’. Oh, gods, Mikkel, I can’t lose this kid. He’s got too much potential. He’s too brave to die in his bed.”

Mikkel reaches around a fallen troll to pat her on the back “Some of the bravest people I’ve ever met have died in their beds.”

“He shouldn’t be dead at all.”

“Don’t write him off just yet. He may surprise us-”

Mikkel is interrupted by a small scream to their left. The greenhorn Sigrun was talking to earlier has only just managed to leap out of the way of a charge of smaller trolls. They pour out of the dorms in pursuit of some invisible goal. With them is a streak of uniform-blue and long blond hair.  
Emil crouches on the flank of a troll that looks like a demented five year old’s attempt at a horse in charcoal, both feet planted firmly in the melting flesh, his face somewhere between fear and total resignation.

“-like that,” finishes Mikkel “I’ll admit I was not expecting this surprise so soon.”

“Yep. That is something you don’t see every day.” agrees Sigrun, her grief swiftly forgotten.

Sigrun watches Emil wrench at the troll’s tendril-mane and lead it by force from the boil of trolls. When he has got it mindlessly charging and leaping over the trenches, he swivels at the hips and tosses something burning at the tip into the trolls.  
The troll buzzes past them. Then explosion knocks the troll off its four legs, but by that time, Emil has already leapt off and rolled to the relatively safety at Sigrun’s boots.

Shrapnel goes everywhere. Flesh shrapnel, specifically.

“OH GODS IT’S IN MY HAIR!” screams someone.

“Who in Hel’s unholy name was that on the troll?” shouts somebody else.

“Looked like a Valkyrie to me!” comes the answer from the next trench along.

“Did we just win?” asks another voice.

“Not just yet!” calls Sigrun “There are stragglers yet! Rifles loaded, knives at the ready, people!”

Emil pushes himself into a sitting position and looks around himself, dazed.  
He squints at Mikkel “Am I alive?”

“Somehow. Can you stand?”

“Uh, maybe- oh, whoops. No. I guess I can’t.”

Sigrun stoops and ruffles Emil’s hair fondly “You know what? Sit the rest of this out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps the smaller trolls thought "Oh! Flying mammal! I must chase it and infect it!" because of their smaller brains. Maybe they all just wanted to belong to a group and look cool in front of their friends. Whatever happened, Emil is lucky it did.


	80. 98: Puzzle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A younger Onni applies himself to the puzzle of the new Hotakainen baby's name.

He is born eight years after Onni and two after Tuuri. 

Onni isn’t happy. He has only just gotten used to Tuuri and now his family wants to foist another tiny, screaming thing into the household, to take up all the space and bogart the adults’ attention and come first every single time when priorities are being arranged. Onni seriously considered giving his sister away to the changelings before he warmed up to her.   
He figured there should be a process to ease older siblings into the reality of having a new baby in the house. He gets a few hints of her existence here and there; diapers suddenly appear, there are faint gurgles behind a closed door, etcetera. Then one day they bring Tuuri out, all quiet and clean and pleasantly surprised to discover she has an older brother, and Onni likewise.

That’s not how it happened, obviously. It happened the same way Uncle Hannu taught him to swim when he was six; he gently booted him into the deep end of the freezing lake and said “Good luck!” 

Surprisingly, neither of these two things happen with the new baby- the new cousin. 

His name is not mentioned because, as it turns out, his parents do not name him. Uncle Hannu tries, but Aunt Paju shoots down all of his ideas. Onni hears this from his parents. He does not hear it from his aunt and uncle. They have not come by since Aunt Paju went into surprise labour on one of her scouting missions. Apparently, she only just got back to the village before Onni’s new cousin showed himself the door and made his appearance in the world.

“Does that mean he’s sick?” asks Onni one morning “Like Ms Ylva’s baby came two months early. Is he sick ‘cos he came too early?”

They are eating breakfast. Well, three of them are eating breakfast and Tuuri is getting her food everywhere but her mouth. She’s given herself a beard like an old man, and giggles every time Onni tells her so and tries to mop her up.

His father laughs “He was only ten days early, Onni. Don’t worry about your cousin. He’s perfectly healthy.”

“Then how come I can’t see him?” he protests.

His parents share a look. One of those annoying adult looks that means ‘uh-oh Onni bumped into an adult issue how do we steer him away from this’. Onni sighs and sits back in his chair, waiting to be patronised.  
He doesn’t have to wait long.

“I’m glad you’re showing such an interest in seeing the new cousin. Last time we talked about him you said babies are gross.” says his mother.

“Well they are.” says Onni, incredulous. He cannot believe his mother is missing how disgusting babies are as she cleans a mono-brow of oatmeal from Tuuri’s forehead “But I still want to see him. How come he doesn’t have a name.”

Another one of those adult looks. Tuuri flings a piece of bread at their father, but misses by a wide margin. She is amused anyway. While his father goes to retrieve the bread, his mother fixes Onni with a sad look. A very sad look.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Dear, don’t.” says his father, his voice full of warning, though it’s kind of hard for Onni to take him seriously when all he can see is his father’s butt and kicking legs as he kicks himself underneath the dresser to get the errant bit of bread.

“Why don’t?” says Onni a tad more shrilly than intended.

“Why! Why, why why!” repeats Tuuri quizzically. She picks up her empty cup and inspects the bottom of it, then licks it.

“Tuuri, don’t- listen, Onni, it’s a little bit difficult, the new baby. Grandma says he’s not sick, but he’s not…he’s not right either.”

“Not right?” asks Onni.

His mother nods “He’s not right.”

Onni will discover what his parents mean when he is about fourteen years old, and finally judged to be old enough to know what was so wrong with his cousin that Grandma discouraged his aunt and uncle from naming him. The new baby had appeared with a luonto in his fist. Disconnected from his body, manifested in the physical world.

Six years later, outside his aunt and uncle’s house, Grandma scoops a pebble from the ground and presses it into Onni’s palm.  
“As big as this.”

“This is barely the size of my fingernail.”

“Your cousin was born with a luonto with no shape, held in his fist. A mage malformed in the womb. I thought about a mercy-killing the moment he came out.”

“Gods.” Onni breathes, clutching the tiny chip of stone close to his heart “Why didn’t you?”

Grandma shrugs “Because of the way he cried. He was very loud. He was making us understand he still had a fighting chance. You understand what it means when a mage is born with an unformed luonto?”

“It means their body couldn’t handle the power?” he guesses.

“In two ways. It means their body couldn’t handle the power because the vessel was too weak. Or it means the power is not the sort to be contained by a vessel of flesh. It means…it means the magic the mage has in their hand is quite literally a piece of the gods. Not a gift. A piece. A piece of godly power pressed into the hands of a mortal soul. I don’t know why it happens. It does, and most of the time they do not survive, the mages. But your cousin did. On his third day in the world we opened his fist and the luonto was gone. No mark left behind. Except your cousin wasn’t dead. We thought it best to keep the rest of the family distant for a while, until we could be sure of what was going to happen.”

What happened, six years earlier, was a kind of burglary.

From an eight-year-old related to the family whose house was broken into, who let himself in with a key he knew was under the mat, and took nothing but a good long look at his new baby cousin. 

Onni comes to the conclusion that he must break into the house to see the new baby at breakfast. He looks at Tuuri, covered in oatmeal and bread crumbs, beaming at him and the world, and wonders why anyone would want to keep something as special as a baby hidden. Especially from the baby’s own family. Even if the new cousin has a horn growing out of his head, Onni knows he will love him. Actually, a forehead horn would sweeten the deal.

So, when the lights are out and the doors are locked, Onni lets himself out through a window and lets himself into a house two streets away through the front door, which he closes tightly behind him. He can already tell from the monstrous, harmonised snoring that both his aunt and uncle are asleep for the night.  
Approaching their bedroom, he lurks in the doorway and scouts for a crib. No crib. Maybe the baby is between them? But he sees nothing between the sleeping figures. Only empty space. What kind of family keeps their new baby in any room but the parents’ room? Everyone knows the new baby needs to wake up eight times a night, screaming for attention, food, a change, or all of the above.

“You guys are weird.” Onni whispers to the sleeping figures.

He does not have far to look, however. In the room adjacent is the crib Tuuri used to sleep in (she sleeps in a pillow-and-blanket lined box, now, because she refuses to go near the bed her parents offered her as a replacement for her crib). Inside the crib is a little thing shrouded in a tight wrap of blankets.   
Onni brings a footstool from the kitchen to help him peer over the edge of the crib. When he does, he is surprised to find he likes what he sees.

Looks like a smaller version of himself. Grey eyelashes and light grey eyebrows are all he can see through the blankets. The baby is asleep. Carefully, he reaches into the bundle and peels a little bit of covering away from the baby’s face, and a little more, and a little more until he has unearthed a chin, a forehead, a little red mouth and a lot of silvery hair.

“You look just like me.” Onni informs the baby “Except with a different shaped face.”

At his words, the baby opens his eyes. He has Onni’s eyes too. Flinching, Onni prepares to beat a hasty repeat. Tuuri always cries when he wakes her up.   
This baby doesn’t cry. He makes a noise like a boat engine and does something with his face that is either a frown or gas doing a convincincing impression of a frown. 

“Hi.” says Onni softly “I’m your cousin.”

The bundle shifts. For a moment, Onni is certain a tentacle is about to shoot out of his cousin and strangle him. Just an arm. A little arm wearing a little sweater, with a little hand at the end that’s grasping for Onni’s fingers. Onni offers the baby a digit and watches with awe as the baby tugs his finger back into the nest of blankets, like a dragon adding another piece of gold to a prized collection.

“I need that finger,” says Onni “But you can borrow it if you want. I guess you’re too young to pick your nose, so I can do that for you. That’s really important otherwise your nose gets stuffed up.”

The baby is content to hold Onni’s finger. Once, he gums it, but does not seem to appreciate the taste and quickly spits it out. Mostly he just holds the finger with the satisfaction of a fisher that has just caught the prize of the lake.  
It occurs to Onni that a baby like this really should have been named by now.

“Maybe I could name you?”

When the baby offers no complaints, Onni starts cycling through his mental list.

“I can’t call you Tuuri or Onni. I’m Onni. You’ll meet Tuuri later, maybe, if you’re unlucky.”

He also tosses the idea of naming his new cousin Hannu. They already have a Hannu in the family. Ville is out too- that was the family dog when Onni was young. He could call him something that wasn’t Finnish. That’d be cool. Onni imagines himself as a much older, much stronger and more sophisticated person, introducing his cousin on the battlefield.  
‘This is my cousin Sayid’ or ‘this is my cousin Darren’. In his vision of the future, his new cousin is powerful and built and has an impressive, booming voice. 

Onni glances at the baby in the crib again and compares his fantasy to the actual one. A pair of frank grey eyes meet his.

“Nah,” says Onni sadly “You’re probably something boring and Finnish. I bet you grow up skinny and weird. You know what? You can- you might, so I should name you after someone skinny and weird. I know all the old heroes. The heroes from before the old world. I’ve got a book about them and Mom reads to me sometimes before I go to bed. Dad tries, but he gets distracted and starts talking about symbolification and stuff.”

Skinny and weird. The list is short- comprised of only one name, in fact, but when Onni says it aloud, he knows it is perfect for his cousin.

 

“Lalli.”

Onni catches his arm at the last moment. Taru groans. Tuuri already has both feet on the boat and looks ready to push the thing out into the channel by herself. But Lalli consents to stop and let himself be tugged back.

“Look at me.”

Lalli raises his grey eyes to meet Onni’s. Even all these years later, it’s still that same frank, no-nonsense look he had in the crib.

Normally, Onni would not touch his cousin. Lalli hates physical contact in much the same way a troll hates sunlight. Still, Onni finds himself cupping Lalli’s angular face in both hands and pulling him so close the tips of their noses almost bump.

“I know.” says Lalli before Onni can get anything out.

“You know what?”

“I love you too.”

He shakes Onni off gently and retreats up the gangplank, then practically flies up it as Tuuri hooks a hand in his collar.

“Bye Onni!” she calls “Take care- oh, gods, you’re crying already!”

Folding his arms, Onni squares his jaw and calls back “I am not! It’s the wind.”

“Sure! We love you, ok?”

Lalli gives a little wave as well. . Whatever the Silent World can muster is sure to be formidable, frightening, nearly lethal. Yet Onni is proud of the strange baby he named in Saimaa. Even more so of the weird, skinny young adult that baby has become.  
Lalli will be safe. Onni knows, at the back of his mind he knows Lalli and Tuuri will protect each other as much as they are able, and they will come back to him, and all that remains for him to do is allow himself to accept that.

“We’ll see you this summer! Safe and sound.” promises Tuuri, a hand over her heart.

Onni believes her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of a luonto being born in a mage's hand is kind of based on an idea I stumbled over while reading one of the translated Chinese epics. I cannot for the life of me remember which one it was, but the male protagonist of the story is born with a piece of jade in his hand, symbolising he has a prestigious life in front of him. So I was thinking about this when working on an idea for a prompt and thought, hey, what if it works the same with mages? When one comes out with this weird bit of glowing light in their little fists, the older mages know to keep an eye on them! So, yeah, there we go, apparently.


	81. 75: Mirror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a modern world, Emil struggles with paranoia and a fear of his friends that might actually be justified.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a goofy one.

It happens again.

Emil is just minding his own business. Minding his hair, actually. His hair was doing some interesting acrobatics when he woke up that morning and he could not quite persuade his bed-head to go away by the time he was out the door. Though Emil is alone on a hiking trail, he is still concerned about his hair.  
What if someone does happen along and finds him looking like an angry cockatoo? The downside of being a person who is constantly worried about their appearance (not vain, but morbidly concerned with how they look) is the fact that he cannot really carry a mirror with him at all times. He made up his mind long ago not to cave to his compulsive grooming by carrying around a hand-mirror. That would just feed the beast.

Instead he makes use of whatever reflective surfaces are available to him. When there is no reflective surface, and there is no pond or puddle or polished rock which might help him out at the moment, and Emil cannot banish the fears that he looks like a crested bird, he will take out his phone and check his hair with a quick photo.  
Not a selfie. Emil considers the word a sin against any language in which it is spoken, and hates English a little bit for being the origin, in the same way he bears a small grudge against Canada for not keeping Bieber a localised terror. He isn’t the kind of person who needs to whip out his phone every few minutes to update his status. In fact, Emil has never taken a…a selfie…unless one counts the ones he takes to check his hair, which he does not.

Emil glances over his shoulder to make sure he is alone. Just the trees and a squirrel darting across the path. He digs his phone out of the light bag he brought to carry food and water (enough for the unlikely event that he stumbles off the trail and gets lost for three days), then takes a quick, unsmiling photo. When he checks the product, a shiver goes up his spine.

How did he not see that when he was taking the photo? The familiar, rake-thin spectre in the background, the brand of red hair falling about its vicious grin.  
A second later it hits him from behind and scoops him off his feet.

“Emil!” hoots Sigrun, swinging him around like a soldier reunited with their spouse “What are you doing here?”

“How.”

“I didn’t expect to see you on the trails this early!”

“How do you always do this.”

“Man, isn’t it weird that we just ran into each other like that?’

Emil’s closest friends have a very strange past-time. Each of them deny any knowledge of what he’s raving about when he questions them, but Emil knows. He knows. 

Once, just before they turned the lights out, Emil turned over in bed to face his boyfriend and whispered “I know.”

Lalli had looked up from his book, nonplussed “You know what?”

“I know about everything.”

“Which everything?”

“I know you make it a personal mission to get in every single one of my do-I-look-like-an-amorous-cockatoo photos. All of you. You and Tuuri and Reynir and Mikkel and Sigrun. You’re even getting the cat in on it.” he had rasped all this like a dying man’s last words.

Lalli let him go on until he was finished, then patted his cheek and said earnestly “You get paranoid when you’re tired. Go to sleep.” And went back to his book.

That was also the day Emil learned he could not trust his boyfriend. Concerning his amorous-cockatoo photos, anyway. 

Three days after the alarming incident on the hiking trail, Emil waits in the town’s main plaza for Reynir. Since he is six and a half feet tall with a braid at least half that length, theoretically, Reynir should not be hard to spot in the crowd. He has, however, remained elusive for the entire fifteen minutes Emil has been here. They were supposed to meet ten minutes ago and Reynir remains mysteriously absent. Normally, you could set a clock by Reynir. He has a routine and he sticks to it. When he promises to be a certain place by a certain time he is there at the exact second which was agreed upon. What could be keeping him?   
Growing anxious with each unplanned second that passes, Emil starts to worry. When he tries to direct his concerns from what might be keeping Reynir, his fears go the place where they are most comfortable and Emil suddenly becomes violently concerned with the state of his hair.

It was in an immaculate, tasteful ponytail when he left the house. What if it has done something crazy since then? What if it has migrated to one side of his head or leaked hair everywhere? What if he only imagined he fixed his hair and Lalli didn’t tell him he was still walking around, looking like a blond thorn bush because Lalli thinks he’s beautiful all the time and can’t tell the difference between a dishevelled Emil and a perfect Emil? Because both of them are perfect to him.  
Dammit, Lalli!

Emil whips out his phone, snaps, and inspects his result.

He screams.

Reynir’s sweet, orange-scented breath warms the back of his neck “Whoops! Sorry! I didn’t mean to get in there with you.”

Clutching at his hammering heart, Emil turns, sags against Reynir’s chest, and wheezes “That’s ok.”

He wonders that he is not used to this nonsense by now.

Later that same day, Emil returns home with sore feet and a headache from listening to Reynir talk. He loves Reynir, of course, but Reynir can talk faster than human thought and his conversations tend to last longer than one of the epic sagas school forced him to read in Classical Literature. Emil honestly cannot remember a single word that was said between them. He assumes they were speaking the same language. Who knows? Reynir could have slipped into his native Icelandic and Emil wouldn’t have noticed.

Because he is too tired to find a mirror and the worry about his hair refuses to leave him alone, Emil stops at the end of the hall and takes a quick picture.

He does not even have time to inspect himself before he notices the two, silvery shapes in the background. Lalli, and his cousin Tuuri, posed in the background like the twins from the shining, except with grey hair and silver eyes.

“Hello Tuuri.” he yawns, swallowing his heart. For some reason it doesn’t scare him as much in his own home.

Tuuri stays for dinner. Tuuri makes dinner, in fact, and seems to know where all the food is better than Emil does. It’s a little creepy and makes Emil wonder if Tuuri sometimes sneaks into their home to reorganise their groceries. While Tuuri bangs around with the pots and the pans and harps at Lalli for not being married yet because, for crying out loud, they’re already twenty-five years old, and what if Emil finds a better offer? Then where will Lalli be except alone and sad because he lost the love of his life because they were too lazy to get married, and make their love a legal bonding contract that makes separation that much harder?  
Because Tuuri’s talk is creeping him out, Emil excuses himself to the front yard to take in the night air. For a time, he stands at the bottom of the drive and stares out at the woods on the other side of the road. 

It is a peaceful night. The moon hangs in the sky like a silver coin on a chain. Clouds pass over it and turn to strands of translucent cotton against its light.

“Beautiful night.” says Emil to himself.

Beautiful. Hair. The words are intrinsically linked in his mind and suddenly he has the ferocious urge to check his hair. Turning his back to the woods to cut the glare from the house, Emil snaps the photo.

A chill shoots up his spine when he looks at it. In the background is a huge, square figure, staring at him from the other side of the darkened street.

Emil turns.

On the other side of the street, Mikkel waves “Good evening.”

Emil waves stiffly “Hi. What’s up?”

“My car broke down two kilometres up the road. When I realised how close I was to yours and Lalli’s house, I wondered if I might impose upon your hospitality until-”

“Sure, come on in. Tuuri’s already here. You can spend the night if you need to.”

As he and Mikkel return to the warmth and the light of the house, Emil still cannot shake the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.  
They know. They know he is suspicious. His friends know he knows they do this ridiculous thing on purpose and they’re going to punish him by tormenting him until he breaks.

Emil shivers again and closes the door tightly behind him.


	82. 88: Pain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuuri has a splinter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could have done something dramatic or shippy. Should have, in fact, but it's been a long week and I'm tired, so we have this piece of nonsense instead.

In the realm of what the human body can handle or will handle when forced to extremes of pain, Sigrun can safely say she has seen some amazing things.

During her training days she saw an instructor shoot themselves through the foot (taking the big toe off entirely, as it would turn out), and then finish the lesson before they could be persuaded to limp up to the medics’. Shortly before she became a captain, she bore an injury that she would have thought would cripple most sane people with agony- her entire left leg was mauled.  
But Sigrun surprised even herself by finishing the battle with nothing but a short dagger and a shorter temper, then amusing herself by making shadow-puppets by the torch-light as the medics and mages worked to save her leg. The pain was agonising, of course, but once the body recognises the peak of the pain it is able to experience, either the consciousness attached to it goes insane, or passes out, or is distracted.

Sigrun could not pass out, so she chose to amuse herself by acting out some of her favourite scenes from her favourite epic until the job was done. It was an odd moment.

She has also seen scarier moments; moments of agony she was sure was going to kill the people she loves the most.

The time Mikkel was thrown fifteen feet by an especially angry troll and rolled another six in the snow. By the time she dispatched his attacker and ran over to him, he was sitting up.

“Are you alright?” she had asked.

“Nothing to worry about.” he stood up and dusted himself off and batted her hands away when she tried to help him walk.  
Danish craftsmanship; the mothers in Bornholm really know what they’re doing when the brew up a baby.

The time Lalli was scored across the side with claws the size of his own forearm. By the time Sigrun finished that troll off and picked him up, he’d already staunched the bleeding partially with some gauze from his belt.

She asked: “Are you alright?”

His response was “What the fuck do you think?”

Scored open and his first instinct is to sass off to authority figures.

There are a handful of other incidents. Emil falling through two stories of rotted house and picking himself up, his only reaction at having fallen almost a dozen metres being: “Whoops!”

Reynir losing an ear in an explosion and joking all the way to the medics “It’s like the most extreme piercing ever! Instead of a barbell in my eyebrow I can wear one through my whole head!”  
Sigrun would have slapped him if he hadn’t been traumatically injured already.

Finally, there’s Tuuri.

Tuuri is made of something special. She is made of something that makes the Bornholm materials look like straw and sticks. Something that, if discovered in a natural deposit, could be used to make impregnable armour. Every time Sigrun sees Onni she wants to congratulate him for raising such a powerful woman, a deceptively powerful one too! Though Tuuri looks like she’s made of cake batter and is more comfortable to lay on than the softest mattress, she can take a hit like no one’s business. In the one bar-brawl she and Sigrun have been in together Sigrun watched her take a hit to the face that broke her nose, and keep right on throwing punches like the hit had never connected. Sigrun has seen her roll down two flights of concrete stairs and bounce up like she was on a loaded spring. Sigrun has even seen her take a shot to the shoulder (friendly fire from some stupid kid who didn’t know their own ass from a troll) and finish the battle without a single complaint of the pain.

In short, Tuuri is a badass. The kind of badass that should make battle gods hang their heads in shame because they do not even approach being that hardy.

This is why Sigrun is more than a little confused by what she is seeing.

Tuuri is prostrated on the floor of the Tank, screaming. Lalli has her raised arm by the wrist and patiently picks at something in her thumb with a pair of tweezers.

Tuuri babbles like a shell-shocked soldier “Get it out get it out GET IT OUT I’M GOING TO DIE IT’S KILLING ME IT HURTS SO BAAAAAAD!”

Lalli has clearly seen this before. He is totally jaded to his cousin’s screams.

“What’s going on?” shouts Sigrun over Tuuri.

“Splinter.”

“That noise for a splinter-”

“LALLI SHOOT ME I CAN’T DO IT I CAN’T DO IT JUST PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY!”  
Her other arm is folded over her face in a gesture of extreme drama.

“Hold on.” he says “Almost out.”

“Are you messing with me? She’s on the floor because she has a splinter?”

Before Lalli can answer, Reynir tears into the Tank with his rifle raised “Where’s the troll?”

Pushing his rifle away impatiently, Sigrun points to Tuuri “It’s a splinter.”

He lowers the weapon in disbelief “A what?”

“She has a splinter.”

Reynir turns and shouts this out the door “Put the bazooka away! Apparently it’s just a splinter!”

“Got it.” says Lalli.

Between the blades of the tweezers is a piece of wood approximately two centimetres in length and less than a quarter of that in width.  
Shaking, Tuuri sits up and rubs her wet eyes. She looks at the tiny bit of wood and gasps “That monster was inside me?”

“Yes.” Lalli flicks the splinter out the open door “How do you feel?”

She sniffs “Shaken. Just…just shaken.”

He pats her stiffly on the shoulder “Do you need to lay down?”

“No, no, I think I’ll be ok. I just…oh gods… I just need some water.”

Lalli helps her up and guides her towards the cockpit, leaving Reynir and Sigrun to gape at each other.

“What was that about?” says Reynir after a long moment “Was that really all over a splinter?”

“I guess so.” says Sigrun, bewildered.

Every hero supposedly has their weakness. For the ancient hero of the Greek sagas, Achilles, it was his heel. For the modern hero of the American sagas, Superman, it was that weird green crystal.   
For Tuuri, the near-indestructible Finn, her secret weakness appears to be splinters.


	83. 67: Playing the melody

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes three days for Lalli to be orphaned. Of course, they are not pleasant days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on the headcanon that both of Lalli's parents were mages. One of them died in the attack, the other was attacked and lost their luonto to a troll. Because, hey, if mages can have their havens invaded, then it stands to reason they can also have their luontos ripped away, right? 
> 
> I guess the link to the prompt here is that Lalli's mother is 'playing the melody' of the Rash. Of the sound the Rash makes when it takes a luonto. Ok, yeah, it's another stretch, but let's see how it works out.

It takes three days for Paju Hotakainen to die. Most of that she spends screaming. 

She starts screaming in the last moments she is able to spend with her son. He sits at the edge of her sickbed, holding her hand willingly for the first time since he was old enough to walk away from her. Paju lies on her back. She will not rise again and can no longer feel anything beneath her waist, having taken a ferocious swipe to the back as she ran from the trolls that crashed down on their home a few days earlier.

“I want you to listen to me,” she says in a cracked voice “You stay with your cousins. Your father isn’t coming back to you.”

“I know.” says Lalli.

“I love you so much. I know it didn’t seem like it a lot of the time. I was a…an angry parent, wasn’t I? Well, I’m sorry for that. More than you’ll ever know. I thought we were going to have more time together. I thought I was going to have time to get to know you and you me and we could be…be different from the way I was with my parents. And this is my last chance to change that, isn’t it? So I’ll say it one more time and I want you to listen to me.”

She squeezes his hand. Her smile is weak. Her smiles are rare and malformed when they do happen. Amateurish mimics, as if no one had ever taken the trouble to take her aside and teach her the real thing when she was young. When she had grown, it was already too late to remedy. The damage was done. Her smile was set.

Lalli, however, has had the fortune to be the recipient of one of those genetic smiles. It is the same one his grandmother has. His cousins have it too, and his father, which is what attracted Paju to him in the first place.  
The smile slips in under the skin as a low light and glows behind the out eyes in a coy, half-reluctant way that suggests to the recipient they are seeing something which would normally be wrapped up and kept in a drawer.

“I love you.” says Paju. These are her last coherent words.

“Me too.” says Lalli.

He knows this as his excusal and does not try to prolong the moment. The moment he has reached the door, his mother lets out a noise he did not know humans could make- until a few days ago, of course, when most of the population of the town demonstrated the variety of sounds of human anguish which can be made.  
Lalli does not turn. He does not want to see anything more.

Onni appears in front of him and whisks him out of the room “Go outside. Go to Tuuri.”

Lalli does not need to be told twice. Rushing out of the house, past the others hurrying towards his mother’s room, he emerges into the fresh air, the air that does not smell of sickbed, and spots his cousin immediately. She lingers at the edge of the scorched woods. Yesterday, to ensure the last of the trolls had been chased away, the trees were burnt. Lalli and Tuuri watched as the remainders of their town drove the beasts into the woods and took torches to it all- a place where they used to play, a place where Lalli took his first steps and Tuuri lost her first tooth when she fell out of a tree.

It burnt beautifully.

Tuuri sits on the blackened remains of a fallen tree. She sees him and stands, her eyes wide with alarm.  
The sounds Paju makes can be heard as clearly as if she were standing beside Lalli and screaming in his ear.

“What’s going on?” asks Tuuri, when he is close enough.

Lalli puts his thin arms around her and pushes his face into her stomach. 

“Hey, hey…it’s ok.”

“The troll ate her luonto.”

Tuuri pulls Lalli into her lap, which she has not done since he was in diapers, and holds him close. He is too big for her to rock, so instead she fills his ears with comforts, competing with the sounds of his mother dying.  
The children sit at the edge of a burnt wood, at the edge of a half-dead town, and listen to the death cries of the last of their adult family.

By night-fall it is no longer unbearable to hear her. Lalli still choses to sleep in their grandmother’s house on the opposite end of town, where Paju’s screeching is reduced to a faint echo. Onni elects to stay at his aunt’s sickbed. He has to make sure her restraints do not break; she thrashes every now and then, and dislocated her elbow with the ferocity of the first round of death-throes.   
Lalli and Tuuri share their grandmother’s bed and spend a few hours staring at the ceiling. First, Tuuri drops off. Lalli cannot bring himself to sleep. He is convinced his luonto will disappear the moment he stops watching him. But his eyelids droop, his heart rate slows, and Lynx is left watching Lalli and Tuuri from his vantage point in the corner of the ceiling. He, too, cannot allow himself to look away from his human for a single second, of what might happen.

On the second day Onni emerges from the house. His face is ashen. His arms are scratched. His eyes are more tired than anyone of his relatively tender age should be.  
He scoops his cousin and sister up and hugs them, hard.

“What would you think about Saimaa?” he mutters into their hair “If we moved?”

“Saimaa?” Tuuri sniffs “Would we stay together?”

“Of course. Always.”

Lalli starts to wriggle out of the bear-hug, his little legs kicking above the ground “Ok, but we gotta bury Mom first.”

On the third day, Paju’s throat is torn and obviously ruined. Her screams are not so much screams as they are loud, projected gurgles. Lalli spends this day under his grandmother’s bed. He eats nothing. He drinks little. Curled into his side is Lynx, who does not move for most of the day.  
When the screaming stops in the late afternoon, Lalli lets another half hour of silence go by before he decides it is safe to come out.

He avoids his house, however, and will not go back to it for the rest of his short time in Mikkeli. Lalli takes himself to the edge of the lake and sits at the edge of what is left of the dock. For a long time, he stares into the water. Not at his own reflection. Just the water.

As if it might contain a message from the gods. An apology, an explanation, a reason why he has just lost all but two of his family members. An assurance that the future is more promising.  
But there is nothing to be seen, save his own reflection.


	84. 91: Drowning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sleipnope and Tuuri have a confrontation, which goes a way that neither of them expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since Sleipnope has had centre-stage for a few recent pages, I figured we'd better give them their fanfic debut.

Tuuri knows she shouldn’t leave the Tank.

There are so many reasons she should not and will not and simply cannot leave the Tank that it seems ridiculous to even consider that there might be a reason significant enough for her to consider, against the certainty of being attacked or infected that awaits her outside.  
Tuuri creeps past Mikkel’s bunk and steps carefully over Reynir, his sleeping body flung out in front of the door like a very hairy draft excluder, and exchanges her slippers for boots. She even manages not to stir Kitty from her slumber on Mikkel’s chest, which is a small miracle.

The others have been out all morning and will be out all afternoon. Now, Tuuri has no idea why this sudden bout of exhaustion has claimed the other two and the cat, but she is not fool enough to ignore a chance from the gods when it is dropped so neatly into her lap. She has no idea either why she has such a strong compulsion to go outside.  
Who knows? Compared to the men in her family, she seems to be the one who is controlled by random, dangerous compulsion. There is a deep spring of restlessness and wanderlust in her. It has fed a desire for adventure that can come out at inopportune moments such as these, in tiny, ill-advised rebellions against the threat of a horrible death which has so far stranded her in the Tank.

This Rash is suffocating. Smothering. Heck- sometimes she wonders if she hasn’t already drowned in it, condemned by her vulnerability to the Rash, and she’s a face-down corpse drifting in the stream of death the Rash has carved out.

She is careful to make sure her mask is firmly affixed to her face. Usually, she has either Reynir or Lalli give it a good tug to make sure there is no give in the straps. She does this for herself and is satisfied when the mask makes a vacuum and tugs alarmingly on her face.  
“Excellent.” whispers Tuuri.

In the back of her mind, she hears Onni screaming at her. For reasons not all that difficult to guess her voice of doom and self-restraint is an internalised version of Onni.

She can hear him now: “Don’t do it. Tuuri, don’t do it. You’re going to die. You’re going to die- young lady, get your butt back in that Tank right now!”

As is her custom, Tuuri doesn’t listen to him. Really it would have been smarter to internalise Lalli. He speaks so rarely that whenever he does say something, she does stop and listen.  
But Lalli isn’t here to point out how stupid she is being. So out she goes.

The sky alone almost makes her transgression worth it. Pale blues, fringed in clouds that are swept to either side, like someone upstairs has been busily tidying away every scrap of shade and shadow that might fall on the land because of them. Tuuri amuses herself with the image of Ukko zooming around the sky with a lightning bolt that has a broom’s end attached to the tip.  
She giggles aloud and stretches the cramps out of her muscles. A walk is just what she needs. A walk to remind herself she is still alive- not yet drowned by the Rash. A walk that could prove to be fatal, but who cares? It’s too beautiful a day to waste. The possibility of death will just make everything she sees all that more clear and gorgeous for the chance that this tree or that brook might be the last thing she sees.

As usual, they have made camp near a pleasant little wood. Lalli tends to pick campsites near woods for pragmatism- near a food source, possible water source and definite source of wood- and out of a primal need to be near trees. Tuuri gets it. One of the reasons she was so unhappy with their extended stay in Keuruu was the lack of trees. Every tree that was there had clearly been planted for decorative purposes. Their place was unnatural, their leaves sickly from being surrounded by smoke all day and all night. Their predecessors had long since been pulled down to make barriers or feed the fires to keep trolls at bay during the long winter nights when they swarmed.

Tuuri loves trees. And there is that typical Hotakainen line of thinking; ‘I’m going to be alright as long as I’ve got some trees to run to’.  
Saved her and Lalli in Saimaa, after all. 

The moment Tuuri is under the dappled green shadows she is lighter. A weight seems lifted from her very soul. Trees. Trees are good.  
These woods, all told, are good as well. The animals here have lost their fear of humans for the utter lack of humans in these parts. All they know to fear are the shambling monsters of sickness- which Tuuri is certainly not. Birds chatter over-head, rabbits spring through the ferns without fear of her and a fox even trots out of the brush and across her path, with a cub following closely behind it.

She picks a game trail to follow through the ferns, like mist up to her hips. She knows this is totally wrong. No forest is this green in the dead of a Danish winter. The weather is sick here, too, from some kind of spiritual disturbance.

“A god died here.” Lalli told her once, just before they got on the highway “A small god. A ruling näkki. They came from over there.” he pointed to a modest river with a few crops of trees following its banks “And came to die here.”

“Why by the side of the road?”

“It seems unclean to me to die in your own home. Then the memories of death hang around forever. They haunt the place.”

She remembers that she took his hand then, and squeezed “Death isn’t always a bad thing.”

“For us.”

“So far. Maybe not forever. Tuoni loves humanity in his own way…though you wouldn’t know it from his wife’s cooking.”

For the first time since the mission began, they shared a laugh.

The shadow of the näkki’s death was an immense bloom of violets, asters, carnations, roses, baby’s breath, sprigs of reeds, tulips, stooped sunflowers, daisies and a scad of other plants that had no business existing in this part of the world, at that time in the year. The flowers were arranged in a kind of spiral shape, as if the näkki which had left them behind was a great snake that died in a gentle coil. 

Tuuri almost wishes she will find something similar here. It would be wonderful to see a living näkki again. She’s only ever seen them from the distance; pale figures crossing the surfaces of the lakes while she rowed by (usually with Lalli sitting beside her, staring unashamedly at the creatures), lights in the woods at night that could not possibly be coming from fires and sometimes, tall, tall figures like men and women that were stretched talking with her grandmother at the edge of the woods.

Näkki can be seen by even non-mages. As far as her relationship with magic goes, it is basically the same as Lalli’s relationship with human contact. As much as he would like to be proficient in the mysterious, arcane art, he is simply not quite equipped to deal with the information, the stimulus pressing in around him, and hates the rest of his family a little bit for being able to handle it all so easily.  
She has only ever used one spell. The prayer of the hunter. Not very good at it either.

Still, Tuuri finds the words have bubbled to her lips, and, standing calf-deep in the woods sick with life in winter, she chants a spell she has not even thought about for a long time.

“Ukko, golden king…”

She is a child again. At her aunt’s swollen belly. Asking what they will name the baby, delighted when he kicks her in the ear. Onni still thinks it odd she can remember things clearly from when she was as young as two.

“Old man in the sky. Take your golden club,”

She is an older child. Her mother has just gotten the results back from the doctor. For the fifth time. The results she dreaded. Her father is trying to stay calm, telling her it’s alright, telling her plenty of people in the village aren’t immune and can still lead full lives. Two non-immune children is not a burden.  
Onni scoops her up and asks her if she wants to go out on the lake. He carries her away from their crying parents and does not allow her to look back.

“And hammer of copper,”

Her coming of age. Her first period. She sees the blood on the sheets and screams, Onni rushes in with a knife and screams, Lalli shuffles in wrapped in his blanket, points at the bloodstain and announces “Ew.”

Had they been in Saimaa still, they would have thanked both Äkräs and Sarakka for allowing Tuuri the choice of bearing children, should she want it, and her good health up to that point in her life. The women of the village always made an enormous fuss of girls when they reached their first menstrual cycle and would, for the following week, fill up the doorstep with baked goods in congratulations, pull the freshly fertile girl aside and whisper advice about how to conduct herself, now that she was a ‘woman’.  
Tuuri dreaded this moment as a child. The fuss. The embarrassment. But she misses Saimaa more than ever. In Keuruu, all that happens is a scramble to procure the necessary hygiene products and to get the bloodstain out of her sheet before it sets in for good.

“And strike the wilderness, hit your hammer in the woods.”

Wiping her eyes on her sleeve, Tuuri lets out a shuddering breath and turns her face to the sky. The same pale blue and swept sky. For a moment she truly did not know if she was in Saimaa, Keuruu or the Silent World. Could have been all three. It felt as if it were all three. 

Tuuri is just wondering if she should cut her walk short when she feels something hit the back of her neck.   
Not breath. The impression of breath. An attempt at breath by something which has not had to breathe in a long time. The hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention. At once, her every nerve is flooded with energy; a warning from her body that she needs to start running now and not look back.

But, being Tuuri, she turns very, very, very slowly, and finds herself faced with irrefutable proof that she may not be as unmagical as she has been lead to believe.  
Once you are faced with a ghost, it is impossible not to know the ghost for what it is. A dead soul. A wandering soul, sharing its grief with those who still wear their flesh. Something made of a creature who has long since passed, glued together by strands of fear, or spite, or both.

Really, though, it looks like a skeletal horse suspended in smoke. The horse’s bones and the smoke fuse at about the midsection into a translucent thing, not unlike ice which has just begun to thaw. In the place of hooves it has hands- eight of them, one for each leg.  
It has bowed its head so that it can look into Tuuri’s eyes. Deep, deep sockets, occupied only by a spark of malevolent curiosity. And hunger.

Tuuri once heard someone close to death is able to see ghosts and spirits they were never able to before. Especially among Finns, whose blood is so charged with magic, even their non-mage population can spin up simple spells.

She has two choices before her, as she sees it. Three, perhaps.  
The first choice is to run screaming as her body commands her. This spirit looks wickedly fast. Towers over her too, and with her little legs, catching up to her would be a task that might take two or three strides to accomplish. The second choice is to shout for help and hope that she is loud enough to wake up Reynir or Mikkel. Well, Mikkel won’t be able to do a thing but watch her die, and Reynir will probably just scratch a rune on a rock and throw it at the horse. Tuuri can tell that won’t do a thing but confuse the horse and probably get Reynir killed as well.

So she picks the third option.

“You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?” she has never known herself to sound as calm and measured as she does now.

“What beautiful bones. How nicely shaped you are. I bet in your day, you loved to run, didn’t you? This country of yours is so flat. So much flatter and clearer than mine. Ideal for a horse, right? You could run all day, in any direction, as far as you wanted to go.”

Tuuri has the sense that she should not touch this beast. Otherwise, she would reach up and pat roughly where the nose seems to be.

“I can’t imagine your pain. I don’t want to, in fact…but I want to tell you that you are beautiful. You must be a wonder to see run, still. Even clothed in just…just the silver smoke stuff, you are so, so beautiful. I never…I never knew spirits were this breath-taking. Ones like you, too, sick and in pain. You’re beautiful.”

Deep in the sockets, the malevolence flickers. Tuuri sees she is right. There is something underneath the sickness. Something that would welcome a hand out-stretched in help.

“Do you remember what you were like? A long time ago by now. Ninety years ago. I’ve only been here for twenty one years. The things I’ve seen, though…the things I’ve seen. The people I’ve buried. Too much to count. Too much to think about.”

The impracticality of chatting to what is probably a Danish horse in her rural Finnish strikes her, but Tuuri is not about to change languages or try to mimic Mikkel’s accent. Her native language is the most genuine option. To help this horse and herself, she should be as genuine as possible.

“But I guess it’s important to talk about too. The people we lose. The world we’ve all lost. If we don’t speak of it, then the past becomes a blur. Not to us. I don’t know about you, but the dead are always in my mind. I still speak to my mother and father. The people who know the dead can never forget them, or forgive them for dying, I suppose. I know I haven’t. When I speak to them I’m usually angry. It’s important to keep them alive, I think. Even if it’s through anger. I know one day it won’t be anger. I’ll be happy telling them about, I don’t know, a new job, what the boys are doing, about the kids I might have…but until then I think anger is alright. It’s no substitute for love, but it’s alright…and that’s where you are, right now, right? Like me? You’ve traded love for anger.”

The aura about this thing. It’s like talking to a piece of carrion.

“Let me guess what you loved. I guess you loved this country. The plains. The trees. The grass. I guess you loved others of your kind- a family, maybe? Maybe you were in a stable at some point. Maybe you loved someone of my kind. And food. You must have loved food. Like apples and oats and sugar cubes. No one can resist those. Even me, and I’m not a horse!”

When she sees the darkness in those eyes flicker, she knows it is not her imagination.

“I’ll tell you what I love. I love books. I love languages. I love that people make sounds with their tongues and teeth and just plain air, and it’s organised itself into this huge system of thought and meaning and poetry. I mean, I’m talking right now and I think you understand me, don’t you? I love watching fires. Embers are just gorgeous. Watching a piece of wood fall in on itself and turn like lava is just so…so satisfying, you know? And I love my family most of all. I have a brother and a cousin. When I tell people about them, people always assume I’m closer to the brother, but that’s not true. We don’t have favourites in my family. We kind of orbit each other. Our lives are almost nothing without each other…family is the safest place in the world to be.”

Tuuri pauses to wipe her eyes, taking them from the horse’s sockets for the first time.

She sniffs “It hits me sometimes how lucky we are to be alive. My brother and my cousin and I. Death came so close to taking us when we were young. It took everyone else we loved. It ate our village. This place called Mikkeli, in Saimaa. They became my home when the Rash ate that place. My brother became my strength and my good sense. My cousin reminds me the world isn’t all pain and work and what I see on the surface. I never tell them I love them, but I really should. I mean, I say it, but I say it as a goodbye. I never tell them why I mean it.”

Tuuri reaches up and touches the horse. Her fingers sink through the smoke, like cold oil, and come to rest on the huge nasal bone. She strokes the bone. Wherever her fingers touch, the white comes away to reveal a dark brown underneath.

“You have to remember the world isn’t all dark. People aren’t all dark. We’re made helpless when we’re young. We’re made to rely on other people, to be cared for, nurtured. Love is kind of a requirement to be a human. And I know you’re not a human. But I know you’re smart. I can see you can hear me and you understand me, so I’ll tell you this now. I love that you’re still there. I love that you’ve been sick for so long, and you can still hear me and see me and a part of you still wants to be yourself. I love that something can survive the Rash. I love that life is still in the world. Even in the dead parts.”

The powdery white residue which has been coming away underneath her fingers becomes brittle. Cracks form quickly and quietly in the surface. Four of the eight legs snap off as hands change to hooves. The white stuff begins to fall away in great sheets, turning to mist before it hits the ground. The shell of smoke around the horse becomes fainter and fainter until it looks like the steam of warm breath in cold air, and is at last completely gone.

A dark brown pelt emerges. A solid, creamy brown that reminds Tuuri of freshly tilled soil. The sockets fill with dark eyes and are fringed with lashes that are better than her own. A black mane tumbles unchecked from the horse’s neck. A tail flicks behind it, chasing the last vestiges of the smoke-mist away. 

“There you are.” breathes Tuuri “Doesn’t that feel good?”

The horse blinks. Gone from its eyes is the malevolence. It’s been replaced by something Tuuri doesn’t quite know in her human range of emotions, but she’s pretty sure it’s gratitude. Close to gratitude. 

And recognition: here’s another mammal who is hunted by the Rash. This one survived when I did not, and this one has reminded me I can live a little bit on the other side of death.

 

When Lalli has washed off the Silent World and got a hot drink in him, Tuuri waves him over from the edge of the campsite. She is perched on a snow-dusted log with her back to the forest, watching Mikkel tend to the cooking fire.

“Long day.” she takes in the deep bags under her cousin’s eyes.

He grunts.

“Mine too.”

Lalli gives her an odd look, then sniffs her suspiciously “Why do you smell like death?”

“I guided the spirit of an eight-legged horse demon to the afterlife.”

Another blank look “You’re going to have to tell me if that’s a joke. You know I don’t get your humour.”

She drives her shoulder into his and ruffles his hair fondly “Of course it’s a joke.”

“You’re weird today.”

“Hey, Lalli-cat, do you think the fish knows he’s wet?”

Lalli puts his head on his knees. He did not think he was going to have to deal with this level of weird, pedantic Tuuri late in the day.  
“No. No I don’t.”

“Because he’s in water all the time, right? He has never known what it is like not to be in the water.”

“Right.” mumbles Lalli into his patella. 

“That’s just like you. You have no idea how much I love you, right?”

He shoots her a sideways glance and after a long moment, he says “I know.”

“Should I say so?”

“Say what?”

“Should I say ‘I love you very much, Lalli-cat’?”

“You just did.”

Tuuri lays a hand on his shoulder, wanting to hug him, but she refrains. This conversation is pushing Lalli’s boundaries already “Well as long as you know.”

Then Lalli straightens up and puts his arms around her, and squeezes “I love you too. Since we’re using dumb nicknames, I guess I have to call you Tuuri-bear.”

Tuuri snorts into his sharp shoulder “Wow. I haven’t heard that since I was fourteen.”

“I haven’t heard Lalli-cat since I was seventeen. Let’s leave it that way.”

“Ok Lals. Whatever you say.”

“That one too.”

“Ok Lal.”

“Tuuri, stop.”

Close to her cousin like this, the sickness in the world is barely present. She does not feel as if she is drowning in the Rash any longer.   
Now, she floats on top of it. As long as she has her family, she will float on top of the carnage, the grief, the death and the certainty of her own in the distant future. 

As long as she is loved and can love Tuuri knows she will be alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several points
> 
> 1) Sarakka? Why is there a Sami fertility deity in Saimaa? Well I figured, hey, there's a good sized population of Sami people in the nation, so why not? The culture could exist in Saimaa and have enough recognition afforded to it now that the Sami pantheon is acknowledge alongside the traditional Finnish pagan pantheon
> 
> 2) Tuuri is mage?  
> Yes. I am a firm believer that Tuuri is SECRET MAGE BECAUSE PLOT-TWIST AND REASONS AND WISHFUL THINKING
> 
> This one was really fun to write. Especially the Tuuri's rambling attempt to talk Sleipnope into their afterlife. Bless your cotton socks, Tuuri. Well probably woollen. Probably Icelandic woollen. I bet they came from Reynir's flock.  
> (And the nickname Lalli-cat. I am obsessed with the idea that this is Lalli's embarrassing family nickname. Mine is Pucus Ducus. Read: Pooh-cuss, Doo-cuss)


	85. 97: Safety first

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tuuri follows every single rule in the driver's handbook and everything is totally safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicating this one to Tamilee for both helping with the idea and poking me in just the right creative buttons to ensure I'd have to write this idea down at some point. 
> 
> Also, excuse the Finnish potty-mouths.

“We got a problem.” 

Sigrun pops her head into the cockpit “What kind of problem?

Swivelling in her chair, Tuuri bellows “LALLI! I NEED YOU!” in Finnish, then says sweetly to Sigrun “Oh, there’s just a troll kind of…squatting in the middle of the road? I’m going to see if I can get Lalli to spook it off.”

The captain scoffs “He doesn’t need to do that! I’ll get the thing to chase me and kill it off-road and that’ll be- sweet mother of Odin, that’s a big one!”

Tuuri nods grimly “No offence to you, Sig, but I thought it might be a little bigger than you could handle singlehandedly. LALLI! GET UP HERE! And I don’t want to try to burn it down with Emil’s spare set, in case it decides to come and fall on top of us. This is a sturdy Tank, but the laws of physics are a bitch. We’d kind of get microwaved in here. Besides, I have no idea how to use that thing. LALLI WHAT IN THE UNHOLY NAME OF LEMPO IS KEEPING YOU?”

A second later Lalli lopes into the cockpit and fixes Tuuri with a glare that has made lesser people go weak at the knees and lose full control of their bladder “I know you think your needs are the most important. I get that. But does it ever occur to you other people are in the bathroom when you decide you need them?” then he stops and squints at Sigrun.

“What?” says Sigrun “Does he think I was screaming?”

“Why is she still here? Didn’t she go with the others?”

“No, she didn’t,” Tuuri motions to the shotgun “Mikkel said she was too sleep-deprived to be of use to anyone, so she let him take over today.”

Lalli lowers himself into the chair like it is the open maw of a crocodile. The glare returns to Tuuri and stays there “Reynir?”

She shrugs “He’s gotta go out sometime. We can’t keep him in here like an animal. Heck- even Kitty gets out more than he does!”

Sigrun has grown suspicious. She paws in her pocket for the suspected mutineers list and takes the pen stationed permanently behind Tuuri’s ear to make a note.

“What?”

“Nothing, Stubby, nothing.”

By now Lalli has found the troll in the middle of the road. Hard to miss. It looks like what might happen if a tree ever became infected and absorbed a few wooden power-lines into its body. The shadow is immense and only just stops in front of them. 

“Ew.”” is Lalli’s immediate observation.

“I heard that.” agrees Sigrun.

“What did she say?”

“She said you’re right. Listen, can you shoo that thing out of the way?”

The glare changes from a concentrated beam of ice to a warmer, incredulous look, like the one he wore when he figured out where milk came from “How?”

“You know. Poke it with Lynx.”

This incredulous look quickly sours and curdles into an expression Tuuri has not seen on him since he got his first vaccination “Poke it.” he repeats.

“Yeah. Poke it.”

It was a not a long time ago that Lalli would have gladly thrown everything he has at the gigantic, craggy troll looming in their path. If only to prove he has a lot to throw. But his last experience with over-exertion taught him why it is not a good idea to do that to one’s self. He and Lynx have had long conversations about it. Lalli still has the bite-marks on his haven-body to prove it.  
He’s learned his lesson. Learned it well. Learned it well enough to know that his comparatively tiny luonto is not going to do much to spook the troll. When pressed, Lynx can change his sizes. Lalli has seen him swell up of his own accord to about the size of a modest house, but this did not entail a release of their shared power. This was just to belly-flop on Onni’s haven to see if they could get away with it. They could not.

Lalli has a sinking feeling that if he tries that kind of tactic, the results will be much the same as what happened with Onni’s haven. Except the troll is not going to restrain itself from killing Lalli. It will go right ahead and do it with pleasure.  
This explanation climbs into his mouth. He’s ready to explain it to Tuuri when the words scramble up and dive back down his throat. He’s not going to talk? Ok, apparently he does not want to talk.

So all he can do is roll his eyes to let Tuuri know what an ill-advised idea this is.  
Tuuri, still thinking of her pride as the cousin of the crazy person she has summoned to fix the problem, interprets this as another assault on her pride.  
She bristles and says in an undertone “Do you have to be such an ass?”

“I can’t do it.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.”

She groans and sags against the steering column “I hate you so much sometimes. Like, nearly half of the time. You’re such an insufferable little- ugh! Onni would do it!”

Though it physically pains Lalli to admit this, he can see no other way to placate Tuuri’s choler “Onni’s stronger than me.”

“Oh. Oh! Well why didn’t you say you weren’t strong enough for it!” she punches his shoulder, her affection returned “Sorry, I thought you were just being difficult. I only hate you about twenty-five percent of the time, by the way.”

“So are we getting close to a solution? We need to get the others in an hour.” Sigrun tucks the list into her pocket and leans on the back of Lalli’s chair.

Lalli sags in his chair to avoid her “What’s she saying?”

“She says we need to get the others in an hour.”

“Just drive.”

“Well, yeah, it’s not like we’re going to walk to them-”

“No, I mean drive. Forward. Into the legs.”

A light of pure manic glee crawls into Tuuri’s eyes. The moment Lalli sees it, Lalli knows he has made a mistake. Again.   
He considers knocking himself out to ask Onni to send over Owl for protection and guidance, but it is too late.

“We’re going to drive.” says Tuuri. She turns and grins at Sigrun “We’re going to drive right through that troll. Seat belt on, Lalli-cat. Safety first!”

“Ukko protect me.” Lalli fishes his hannunvaakuna pendant out of his shirt and twists the cord around his fist for strength.

And, indeed, somewhere in the blue depths of the sky, an old golden man finds himself stirred by a particularly desperate plea. The old man rises and parts the clouds gently, lazily with his golden club and takes a gander at what’s happening in Denmark this time.  
“The Hotakainens again. Chip off my gold and colour me surprised.” he mutters to himself in a voice that could easily be mistaken for a thunderstorm “You quit whining, boy. Let the woman do what she’s doing.” the clouds fall back into place and the old man retreats into the blue depths shaking his head in wonder at this wimpy generation. You’d think an apocalypse would have toughened them up some.

“Tuuri.” says her cousin “Don’t.”

“Tuuri do! This was your idea anyway!”

Meaning he’s going to get blamed if she runs them into a ditch, or more likely, the troll peels the top of the Tank off with its prongs and eats them like beans out of a can.   
So Lalli resigns himself to the fate that seems to be set for him. He wishes briefly that he could write in Swedish so he could leave Emil a note, telling him why he will in the near future find their three bodies smoking in the wreckage, and an apology for leaving them stranded. Maybe a declaration of his confused feelings as well? It’s not like that kind of stuff can embarrass him after death, right?

When Tuuri hits the gas, no one but Tuuri is prepared for just how fast she plans to drive. If Sigrun were not as close to sovereign ruler of the steely-nerved bad-asses of the world, she would be thrown to the very back of the tank into Emil’s bunk. However, because she would happily and rightfully accept title of Queen Badass, she manages to hang onto the back of Lalli’s chair with her fingernails and sheer willpower.  
She lets out a whoop as they accelerate that cannot be mistaken for anything but sheer joy. She has never killed a troll with a tank before! Tuuri’s voice joins her and leaves Lalli looking between them both, too disturbed to look at the troll, and wondering if he might actually be the only sane person in the Tank.

Impact comes and hits hard. Seatbelts were a wonder of modern technology when they were invented and remain a wonder of post-apocalyptic technology. Tuuri and Lalli are saved from launching through the windshield only by the belts. Again, Sigrun seems to have generated her own bubble that warns off things like velocity and gravity, and goes untouched by the impact.  
The Tank takes the shock like it was meant to- which it is, but Tuuri’s driving leaves some skill to be desired. She is not accustomed to driving war machines and does not quite know how to use the Tank so that the maximum protection can be ensured while maximum destruction is wrought.

On the bright side, the Tank inflicts incredible damage even at the 75% capacity Tuuri has the Tank working at. The troll definitely comes off the worst.  
The Tank essentially whizzes through the troll’s cluster of legs. Bones crack overhead. Many, many bones. More than have any business being in one single body. For the first time since his cousin stamped the accelerator, Lalli pipes up.

“Perkele!”

“I know, right?!” yips Tuuri.

Behind them the troll goes down hard. A long spidery limb whistles over their heads and crashes off to the side of the road.

Lalli elbows Tuuri fiercely “There’s more ahead you idiot!”

There are. The long spindly troll must have been the head of some kind of herd of trolls. Everything from needle-shaped things like the one Tuuri just crushed to enormous, bulky things to eldritch horrors which resemble the kind that drooled on Emil from a ceiling in Denmark, a few long months ago.  
A plodding and galloping and limping charge of them. Coming head-on at the Tank.

“Fresh prey!” hoots Tuuri.

Sigrun gets the idea, even though this last chirrup of a battle-cry is in Finnish “Tuuri, you’re my kind of crazy!”

Lalli braces himself and mutters dryly “Mother, Father, prepare a place for me in Tuonela.”

 

Emil notices the sound at about the same time as Reynir. While Reynir springs up like a bloodhound that has just scented a rabbit, he merely looks up in concerns. Sounds like a building is coming down. On a hall full of angry animals? 

“Mikkel!” he calls into the lobby of the old house they have just finished up on “I think something’s coming our way!”

The response floats out of some unseen gloomy corner “May I ask as to the nature of what’s coming at us?”

Emil pauses and listens carefully “Sounds like a whole infected zoo. Lions and everything.”

“What?” Mikkel pops out from behind a bookshelf “What do you mean?”

“I mean…no it sounds like an infected slaughterhouse.” he detects the familiar throaty growl of an engine “By Reynir’s gods! I think it’s the Tank?”

A second later Reynir shouts an expletive in Icelandic that Emil knows well enough to use by himself, by now “Thor’s beard!”

About a quarter of a mile away, something black and soggy is launched into the air. As it traces out a near-perfect parabola in the crisp Danish afternoon, Emil fits the pieces together.  
“I think Sigrun might be driving?”

Mikkel materialises at his side “Reynir!” he barks something in Icelandic. 

Reynir remains frozen where he is. A rabbit in the headlights. Emil reaches out and takes the edge of Reynir’s braid, pulling him back gently.

“Stay close.” he says.

Mouth open, Reynir flashes him a look that says ‘are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

Emil is. Another troll rockets up into the air. This one is launched in their direction, and even though it falls well short, the spatter of rotten blood stops only about twenty metres in front of them. As he is apt to do in moments of extreme danger Mikkel grabs Reynir and Emil by their collars and drags them backwards to safety.  
By now the familiar peals of semi-psychotic laughter can be heard. Emil is not sure whether to relax or fear for his life.

“By all Reynir’s gods,” rumbles Mikkel in the manner of a protective father grizzly “If Sigrun has her red-headed ass behind that wheel, I’m going to send it all the way back to Dalsnes in one swift kick. You see if I don’t.”

Emil does not feel any shame in shying behind Mikkel “I won’t stop you.”

The next ten seconds are the tensest of Emil and Reynir’s lives. Not Mikkels; as a veteran midwife and survivor of Kastrup, it takes an awful lot to ruffle his feathers. This rates only a star-gazing birth or a small infected breach. To scare Mikkel, it will take an emergency on the level of a C-section with farm tools or a total collapse of the front line. And even then these horrors would be repeats of past controversies.

The Tank tears into view around a corner, making such a sharp turn it clips one of the ancient street-lights. The Tank screeches to a halt in the middle of the road, the door pops open and the owner of the raucous laughter sticks her head out and calls “Yo! Mikkel? Emil? Where are you boys? Is Reynir still alive?”

“What in blazes have you done to the Tank?” shouts Mikkel- actually shouts.  
From the relative safety behind Mikkel’s back, the shout feels like an earthquake to Emil.

The Tank is so covered in troll viscera it is impossible to see into the windshield, though the wipers have begun a valiant effort to clear the layers of intestines and withered appendages. Occasional scrapes in the paint and chips in the metalwork are the only sign of damage to the Tank; at some point in the rampage, someone had the foresight to close the headlamps and tuck in the remaining rear-view mirror. Rotted blood is absolutely everywhere.

Sigrun strides out bare-foot to meet them “Don’t worry about this shit getting into the vents and stuff. I had Tuuri close them off while she drove.”

“Tuuri?” blurts Mikkel “Tuuri did this?”

“Sure did!” chirps Tuuri from the cockpit “And I loved every stinking second of it!”

Out of the Tank comes a stiff, pale Lalli. Paler than Emil has ever seen him- and on a good day Lalli looks like he was rolled in flour, then snow, then had all of his blood sucked out. This hue is practically translucent. His fears forgotten, Emil runs out to meet him, past Sigrun, and is actually met half-way when Lalli does a running-jump into his arms.

He’s shaking. No wonder! Emil can only imagine what that carnage must have looked like from inside the damned Tank! There is just enough Swedish and Finnish between them to communicate.  
“Can you stand?” he asks gently.

“No,” says Lalli in Finnish (his favourite word).

His legs cop out on him at about the same moment. Luckily Emil already has a firm grip on him. It is just a matter of helping Lalli sit down on a dry patch of pavement and patting him on the back while his stomach threatens to empty itself.

“What happened?” asks Emil.

“Bad things.”

“You ok?”

Lalli answers this by sagging completely into Emil’s chest. His eyes are glassy and fixed on some distant point.

“Uh, you’ve got blood on the…the hannunvaakuna.” 

“Ok boys, as soon as the Twig’s decided whether or not he’s gonna expire on the road, we’ll get moving to the next campsite. How did the hunt go?”

Mikkel stares over Sigrun’s shoulder “How do you expect our darling non-immune to get in there without being smeared by germs? He might as well give mouth-to-mouth to an infected head.”

“We’ll stick one of the rain tarps over him! We could do with a good storm to wash this off. Hey, those clouds look promising, don’t they?” she points up at dark, frowning brow of iron-grey clouds rolling across the flat sky towards them.

“I think Lalli might need a bag to breathe in.”

“Hey,” pipes up Reynir from the safety of the house “Where did Kitty go?”

If Mikkel was a religious man, now would be the point at which he would lift his arms and ask the skies why they have gifted him with this band of happy morons. But Mikkel has not been a religious man since high-school and does not intend to change this.   
Instead, he glances up at the sky and agrees with Sigrun “I think you may be right. Looks like we’re in for a shower.”


	86. 68: Hero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emil wakes up inside his barrow and is taken somewhere, slightly against his will, with no idea what's going on, but a vague sensation of being at peace with himself. The part of himself that's a giant gold deer, that is. Time to play the hero.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a continuation of that prompt a while back where Lalli discovers Emil is asleep in the barrow, and the one after that when he goes back to check on him and finds his sweet, stupid prince has gone and taken a battle-axe with him.
> 
> Warning: looooong. Once I started, I couldn't stop.

Emil awakes upside-down.

This is not the first time this has happened. He falls out of his bed a lot, leaving his legs tangled in the blankets so that he is frozen in a half-slither to the floor. One time he stepped in a trap that turned him upside down so rapidly his brain had no choice but to pass out to save him from the overload of information.  
But this time is different. This time he knows he has been literally wrenched out of his bed and hung upside down.

How does he know this? Because he’s staring straight at the bear that has done it.

Emil blinks. 

“He’s awake.” announces the bear.

“Mikkel?” blurts Emil “Why are you a bear?”

“No reason in particular. How do you feel?”

“Confused.”

“But conscious?”

“Um, yes. Very conscious?”

“Good. Good answer. I’m going to turn you over now. Try to remain calm.”

Very, very gently, Mikkel the bear rights him in mid-air. For the first time Emil becomes aware he is about two stories off the ground. He is also clad in an outfit very different to the one he was wearing when he collapsed into his bunk.

Emil grasps the bear’s massive paw as a dizzy person would grasp the railing of a tall building “I have two questions.”

“Please, ask.”

“So…so you’re a very tall bear. A very tall talking bear. And I’m dressed like…in blues and blacks and these are definitely not my boots. And I have a huge sword on my belt. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“I do. What would you like to know?”

“Everything, please. Uh, could you put me down?”

“Certainly.”

Mikkel deposits him gently on the springy grass. Emil looks down at himself. At a deep blue shirt and breeches and boots that look like they have just finished stomping some troll-heads in. Over that he wears a grey wolf’s skin that reaches his knees and, wow, is it the warmest thing he has ever put on.  
At his belt is a sword that is almost half his own length and covered in jewels at the pommel. A long braid hangs over his shoulder, woven with a thick thread of silver. Emil pushes a strand of hair behind his ears and finds they are double-pierced.

“Um.” he says again.

“Yes,” confirms Mikkel “Um.”

“So…so you’re an enormous black bear. And I’m…I’m some kind of rich kid again?”

“I would imagine you are a king, Emil.”

“Uh, king of what?”

“From the looks of your barrow, kings of heavy arms. I must go.”

“Wait, wait, you’re just gonna leave me?”

“I’m afraid I must. I have left myself undefended in an area famous for its ravenous beasts. I could be attacked at any moment. Listen to me now; you need to go that way,” the bear lifts an arm the length and size of a modest fishing vessel and points towards a nearby forest at the base of a looming mountain “You need to find Reynir and Onni, Lalli, too, if you can manage it.”

“I’m so confused.”

“As am I. You’re a smart boy, Emil. I’m sure if you apply yourself to the task you will eventually deduce what is going on. I certainly have no idea.”

The bear turns, casting an enormous shadow over Emil as it does. Emil considers shouting after the bear, or Mikkel, or whatever it is, but that last part about Reynir and Lalli and Lalli’s older scary cousin have just completely confounded him. Emil is officially confounded. He has no idea what is going on. He is not even confident his name is Emil.   
Is he himself? He is not dressed as himself. There’s metal in his ears and a huge sword at his belt and the last time he wore a braid this long he was a tiny fourteen-year-old. 

“What is going on?” he asks.

A cool shadow falls over him. Something pokes him gently in the spine. Emil turns and ends up head-butting the stag that has just pushed its muzzle into his back. In the same way that one knows they are looking at themselves in a mirror or the surface of clear water, Emil knows he is looking at himself. Into a very strange mirror, perhaps.

“At least you’re awake this time.” says the Stag in a voice that is not quite Emil’s, but as close to being a perfect mimic of him as is ever going to come “Last time you were only up long enough to pop outside and stare, then you went back in,” it nods towards a structure of earth, grown-over with grass that is nearly as big as Mikkel’s bear was tall “And I thought, well, there goes our chance to remember ourselves. You’re going to sleep forever. And yet here you are. Awake and alive and alert.”

“Are you made of gold?” he asks the Stag- no, Stag, his name is simply Stag.

Stag blinks at him in a way that suggests either affection or derision or both “Yeah I’m made of gold. Is that important?”

“I can stick my hand through your face.” Emil demonstrates this a few times just to make sure Stag understands what a momentous discovery this is. Inside, Stag feels like a cold stream, all clean and pure, but also like a warm oven, warm and protective.

“Stop that.” says Stag after the third time “We’re pressed for time you know. Now go in and get the battle-axe.”

“Battle-axe?”

“Sigrun’s battle-axe.”

“What?”

Stag nudges him impatiently towards the massive thing (a barrow- it’s a barrow) “Get in there! I’ll explain on the way. You’ll know the axe I mean. The one that screams Sigrun.”

Inside, the barrow is drenched in weapons. Apart from the slab he was presumably sleeping on, every available surface is strewn with weapons. All of them are manual, like axes, swords, bows, broadswords, daggers and a few bits of armour thrown into the mix. His parents used to have a sword crossed with a battle-axe over the hearth, for reasons Emil does not quite understand, but suspects as a simple case of ‘hey we’re rich and we can do this’. That was an ancient but well-oiled pair of weapons.  
The kind of set of weapons he could imagine the heroes of the ancient sagas using to gore each other and clasp in death-grips to please the Valkyries hovering on the edge of the battlefield. Each and every one of the weapons in this room- this barrow- puts the pair over the hearth to shame. 

One axe in particular catches his eye. An over-sized thing with a double-sided blade and a shaft about half his length. The base of the shaft is capped with an iron spike that looks like it might have been used to bayonet a skull and was not cleaned completely afterwards. It is so large it takes up half of the wall it is propped up against. The broadswords around it are made to look like toothpicks by comparison. The dagger which lays near its base looks like a fingernail clipping.

Emil points at it and says to Stag “Sigrun?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember anything. I’m not even sure if we’re supposed to be here, but if I had to pick an axe I would say that one looks like something Sigrun would dream about.”

“No way I can pick this up,” says Emil as he grips the handle and tugs experimentally. To his surprise, though the weight is immense, it is not too heavy for him. Not comfortable to carry. Not at all. But far from impossible. “Oh. Um…so dream-me must have really been working out.”

“Wow,” if it were possible for deer to grin, Emil would say confidently that Stag is doing so right now “We’re pretty strong aren’t we? Awesome. Ok, hop up on my back.”

“What?”

“Hop on my back.”

“But- my hand. Through your face.”

“I can make myself solid too.”

Emil tests this and finds it is true. This time, Stag’s face refuses to yield to his palm. The real problem is finding out how Emil, with short legs to match his relatively short height of 5ft 6 inches, is going to get himself up onto Stag, who is larger than the average warhorse, while still hanging onto the battle-axe which is almost twice his size.  
Finally, after a lot of kerfuffle, one of them gets the idea that Stag should crouch for Emil. Neither of them are sure who the idea originated with so end up congratulating each other profusely when it works.

“Ok. New problem. How am I going to gallop with that weight on my back?”

“Do deer gallop?”

“I don’t know. I just enjoy the word. Here, I have a feeling that you should look in your sheath.”

Balancing the axe carefully on his knees, Emil draws the sword from the sheath and forgets how to breathe, momentarily, as the dim sun of the dreamscape glances off the sword. Afraid to touch it. Emil can tell he has just drawn a weapon of enormous, insidious power. What happens next comes naturally to him.  
For no reason at all other than that it occurs to him he might try it, Emil sticks the shaft of the axe into the sheath. By all rights, it should not fit. The weapon far too large to fit a sheath that is made for an average-sized long sword. But the sheath does not care for Emil’s ideas of reality and eats the entire axe, the wide double-blade at all, without so much as popping a seam in distress, then fits its sword back in as if there is nothing to jostle it inside.

“Are you as confused as I am?” asks Emil.

“Probably a little more confused.” admits Stag.

“I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.” he blurts, randomly, but not at all awkwardly. It feels like the obvious thing to say.

“You have. You’ve just never seen me before.”

That settles that.

Emil does not even ask where Stag is going. It would seem inappropriate to do so. Almost rude, in fact.  
All Emil knows is that he’s on a gigantic deer that feels like another part of himself, tearing through an unfamiliar and frightening wilderness. His clothes are as comfortable as if they were tailored specifically for him and worn in like he has worn them for a few years. They remind him of the T-shirt he used to break out on warm summer nights. He wore that thing four times a week every summer from fourteen to seventeen, when he left home for good, and still wishes he had it for the summers now.  
The wolf skin hugs him in the same way that shirt did. An old friend made of cloth, draping itself in a casual embrace around his shoulders and arms. 

“I’m pretty sure this is a dream.” he tells Stag.

“It is. It’s still happening, though, so don’t think you’ll be fine if you die out here.”

The number of questions he should be asking right now don’t really register in his mind. Why am I comfortable with this sword at my belt? Why can I pick up an axe over half my size? How come I’m on this gigantic deer like I know how to use him as a battle-steed? How come I’m on a giant deer? Am I dead, drugged or just having a really weird dream?  
The simple fact of the matter? He doesn’t care. This feels right. In the same way it feels right to be trapped in a Tank with the absolute strangest and most entertaining people he has ever known, being on Stag’s back as a dark forest whips by on all sides just feels right. 

Lights flicker in the corner of his eyes every now and then. Once, he glances to the side and sees they have interrupted a small herd of wild boars trotting through the woods. They are all traced out in hues of red and look back at him like he’s just a mild irritation instead of what appears to be a minor royal on a deer the size of a horse and a half.  
Another time, they pass underneath a flock of crows. Again, red crows. The way they look at Emil and Stag is not as benign or inviting. Emil is glad of Stag’s horns; whatever bird would try to dive-bomb them with these babies on their side is in for a good poke, if not a down-right goring.

The journey has lasted maybe all of ten minutes when Stag finally breaks into a large clearing in the woods. A field swaying like an ocean of long grass, with a seafoam of wildflowers.  
And a red thing that stands out immediately in the greenery.

“Sigrun?” Emil dismounts with minimal clumsiness and wades into the grass. 

He’s up to his waist and maybe two feet away from Stag when he realises he has made a mistake. Across the field, just beyond Sigrun, something black pops over the top of the grass. Emil is not sure what he’s looking at. A ball with shiny teeth and no lips to contain them. A bird whose beak was snapped off and replaced with kitchen knives.  
And it is disconcertingly pleased to see Emil.

“Stag!” he shouts, at about the same time the thing charges.

Stag’s neck is under his arm in less than a second. The next movement comes naturally too. Emil loops one arm around Stag’s neck and finds a purchase in the fur, putting the free hand on the pommel of his sword. He lifts his feet from the ground and presses them in a strange, mid-air crouch to Stag’s flank.   
When Stag starts forward, Emil has the brief sensation of flying.

How is he doing this? Last time he checked, every horse he ever went near tried to buck him before he was even in the saddle.  
Again, it is of no consequence. He only feels as if he is doing something he has longed to do for an untold amount of time.

Stag leaps. He sails over the prone, red thing, which Emil confirms as Sigrun with a quick downwards glance. At the same time, Emil draws his sword. The black thing whips up into the air to meet them. It trails a filthy black liquid like it has just leapt from a puddle of oil.  
The sword passes through the thing’s head at about the same time Emil realises he has just half-beheaded a distorted, vaguely human figure. If a human had been built of twigs instead of bones, then coated in viscous darkness instead of flesh.

The corpse falls shortly after they land.

Emil mounts Stag properly this time and surveys their surroundings quickly. The grass shivers on all sides. Flower-buds are streaked with the same sticky black stuff. 

“Get Sigrun-”

“Hop to it!” screeches a voice in his ear.

Emil screams. The voice screams in his ear too, startled, and a slinky, furry thing the size of his forearm appears in the branches of Stag’s horns.

“Sable!” cries Stag “You scared us!”

“Scared you? Oh, I scared you- GET YOUR GREAT GOLD ASS MOVING AND GET MY AWKWARD BEFORE WE’RE ALL KILLED AND THEN WE CAN ARGUE ABOUT WHO’S MORE AFRAID RIGHT NOW!”

Stag does not need to be told twice. He breaks into a swift, cautious canter. Meanwhile, the animal called Sable climbs down in a way that looks more like melting and comes to rest between the bases of Stag’s horns. It stands on two legs and sniffs Emil curiously, coming so close its cold nose bumps his.

“Uh.” says Emil “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but you’re Sigrun, aren’t you?”

“I’m Sable. I’m what Sigrun looks like on the inside.”

Funny. Emil never pictured Sigrun as a menacing ferret-like thing about the size of a small housecat. He had her pegged for a grinning wolf or a dragon that loved nothing more than the sound its enemy’s gristle made in a fire.  
It- she, going by the voice- narrows her eyes at him and stares. Then she draws back all at once and grows agitated.

“Well I guess you don’t know what’s going on right now.”

He points to the inky trail left by one of the things that are even now rapidly converging on them “What are those?”

Sable scrunches her face up in what appears to be despair “You can’t even remember what a Svartalf looks like? Oh, gods, Spirits, give me strength. This is going to be all kinds of Hel. Scoop.”

“What?”

“Me. Onto the deer.”

They have reached Sigrun now. The closest of the Svartlaf is maybe ten metres away and closing in quickly. Stag bends again and Emil grabs Sigrun by the shoulder, man-handling her onto the deer so that she is slumped forward on Stag’s neck, apologising each time he has to tug her.

“Poke her with the axe.”

“What?”

“I can smell our axe in your sheath. Dig the handle out, poke her in the palm with it and she’ll be up in a matter of seconds.” with that, Sable turns and scurries down the front of Sigrun’s shirt, then chirps from the collar “And hang onto me- us. I’ll kick your pretty ass if we die because of your butter-fingers.”

Stag screams and stands abruptly.

Instinctively, Emil turns and slashes at something grasping at Stag’s back-legs. The half-headless Svartalf still has its lower face and can grin as wide as it pleases at Emil as he cuts it at the wrists.  
“Oh gods! It’s not dead!” he shouts “Stag, move!”

Stag moves. Boy, does he move. He springs up and bounces all over the field, dodging every single Svartalf that tries to intercept them. The black residue begins to streak his side from where his pelt touches the tainted flowers. Emil has no chance to draw his sword again; hanging onto Sigrun and Stag at the same time takes all his strength and dexterity.

He hears someone babbling and realises it can only be him: “Shit, shit, shit, shit, son of a shit, shit shit, I want my aunt, shit, shit…”

They are little more than three metres from the woods when a Svartalf finally gets the drop on them. A black figure rears up from the ground and spreads its arms- wings- with a wet snap. A huge shape like a glittering sheet of oil billows out in front of them. Stag cannot stop in time, so he lets his legs buckle under him and falls to the side. The cry of pain he lets out as he hits the ground and scrapes drives nail-like into Emil’s chest. He does not even care that his right leg has been pinned under Stag, nor Sigrun thrown a few feet.

“Stag! Get up!”

“I can’t! Something’s got my legs!”

Emil looks back and sees the hands of the first Svartalf are still stubbornly attached to Stag’s legs. The fingers have grown long and spindly and wrap Stag’s legs together. Stag tries fruitlessly to rise on his front-legs, but before he spills back to the ground, Emil has the time to drag himself out from under his deer.  
He draws his sword and stands as best he can, ignoring the pain in his leg. Again and again he slashes at the black ropes. Even as they fall away new, thicker strands have grown in their place and creep steadily up to Stag’s body. They’re going to drown him, he thinks, they’re going to seep into his sinuses and mouth and use his body as their own.

And all the while the other Svartalf are coming closer. Now, they lope and stalk slowly, knowing they have the time to enjoy their hunt.

“Emil! The sheath, goddammit!”

It occurs to him that Sigrun is still prone in the grass. Shit.  
He rips the sheath off his belt and tosses it blindly in her direction. He does not see the axe sail easily out of the sheath. He does not see the Svartalf that hooks its teeth into Sigrun’s collar and drags her backwards while Sable claws uselessly at its face.   
He does not see the axe blade hit the dirt a few inches above and to the side of Sigrun’s shoulder and face, parting a strand of her hair in half, and totally braining the Svartalf.

But does he ever hear it when Sigrun stirs.

Her scream is the kind that would startle a Valkyrie.

“LITTLE SISTER!” she cries.

“What the Hel?” cries Emil back, now just pulling the ropes away from Stag’s legs as quickly as they can form.

Sigrun springs to her feet. The axe is bumped from the dirt by her shoulder and lands in her hands at the perfect swinging angle. Lifting the double-bladed over her head, Sigrun lets out something that might be a battle cry or a very loud yawn.

“Great gods.” says Stag, his panic forgotten.

“Sigrun!”

Her crazed eyes find him.

He points to the nearest Svartalf “Kill!”

She jumps over him. From a standing position she jumps and sails about five metres and lands squarely behind him without so much as flinching. 

“Hey ya bastards! Remember me?” she swings the axe and halves the Svartalf.

Before Emil can say a word she has darted off into the long grass and begun to swing in a wide circle. She’s carving out a defensive line, looping around them.

“Emil! It’s on my face!”

Suddenly Emil realises he has neglected to kill the thing that upset Stag in the first place. The great sheet of oil looms over Stag and has begun to drape itself over Stag’s nose.

He cannot stand. It is not fear- it is the feeling his legs are bound again and again and again with freezing ropes.  
So Emil has to settle for throwing his sword. The Svartalf is so damn big it’s hard to miss it. The sword strikes the Svartalf in the middle, tears a huge gash in its flesh, and continues on into the woods.

“Shit!” shouts Emil.

And then, in the woods, he hears quite distinctly over Sigrun’s bloodthirsty laughter: “Holy Ukko!”

And what happens next he has a hard time processing. So far, all of the spirits he has seen so far have been either gold, like Sable and Stag, or red, like the boars and the grows. This one is the silver-white of a full moon. Its colour stands out all the more against the thick black its rips its claws through.

The Svartalf lets out a cawing scream, like an injured crow, and literally explodes. The black gunk turns to ashes as it flies in multiple directions, so when Emil is splattered it is with a bunch of ash and cold coals rather than oil.

“Emil!” 

A familiar figure bounds out of the woods and is at his side in seconds.

The silver spirit, a lynx, zips over his head and starts to slash at the black ropes that has reached Stag’s hips by now with the same vicious zeal.

“Ok. Ok we’re fine now.” Stag lays his head on the ground “The cavalry is here. We’re safe.”

Lalli kneels beside Emil and pulls him up to his knees.

“What hurts?”

“My leg. Legs. I can’t move them.”

Lalli is somewhere between bemused and scared “Why are you grinning like an idiot then?”

“That’s the first time you ever called me by my name.” Emil does not know why that makes him so happy “Normally you just grunt.”

“I’m not going to shout ‘hey you messy Swede’ in battle, am I? Come here,” Lalli lays him down on the ground so that his legs are stretched out and upper-torso is propped up against Lalli “This is going to hurt.”

“THAT’S RIGHT! WHO WANTS SOME MORE?” Sigrun howls in the long grass.

Emil is distracted from the crazy spectacle of Sigrun twirling her axe like a baton and Svartalf pieces flying in all directions when Lalli pulls out a small stone dagger and poises it just above his knees.

“Whoa! Hey, I didn’t agree to an amputation!”

“I’m cutting the curse off. It’s crude, so it’s going to hurt like fuck.”

Before Emil can protest the knife is in his leg- but not in it, because his leg has gone all gold and transparent and he can see every single capillary as if he were made of glass.  
Lalli tears the knife out sideways. Out comes a little black clump on the blade, and then he repeats the process with the other leg.

Emil bites down on the collar of his shirt and half-screams a few choice words to let Lalli know how he feels about him at the moment.

“Done.” Lalli sheaths the knife and straightens up, wrapping his arms around Emil’s waist “Can you stand?”

“I think so-” he immediately falls back into Lalli’s arms “Nope.”

“Lynx! Get Stag up, we need him to move Emil.”  
“He’s up, or did you go blind from stupid again?” snaps Lynx, who then swivels his big silver head to the field and roars “Sable! Reign that crazy awkward in!”

When Stag is within arm’s reach, Emil winds his arms around Stag’s neck and lets Lalli push him up onto the spirit.   
“Are you ok?”

“I’m ok,” says Stag grimly “Traumatised, but, you know, this is more excitement in half an hour than I’ve had in nineteen years.”

“Sigrun! Stop killing stuff!” barks Lalli.

Sigrun turns and notices him for the first time “Lalli! Look at you! What are you doing on this side of Asgard?”

“Just get on the deer! I’ll explain later!”

Sigrun raises a hand to let him know she needs a moment, then turns and absolutely bellows out at the field and woods “THOSE OF YOU THAT DON’T REMEMBER ME BETTER FIND MEMORY LANE AND TAKE A SPRINT DOWN IT! I’M NOT THE KIND OF CRAZY YOU WANT TO FORGET- AND OH, I WILL BE BACK! I WILL BE BACK FOR YOU SLIMY BASTARDS AND YOUR EQUALLY SLIMY BASTARDS AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU WILL FEEL THE DOUBLE-BLADES OF LITTLE SISTER BITE INTO YOUR SKULLS BEFORE THIS NEXT WINTER IS COME, I PROMISE YOU THAT!”

“She’s crazy,” mumbles Emil.

“Crazier than usual.” agrees Stag.

But she does not chase the Svartalf as they flee. Even the weak, limping ones that are getting left behind, although Emil can tell it is taking an extreme effort of self-control not to pick the last ones off.

Sigrun starts to shrug a cloak off. Emil has no idea what she’s wearing, even though he has the time to look now all he can see is the black blood/skin of her enemies she is coated in. Once the black-matted cloak comes off Sigrun flings it casually to the side and cracks her neck.  
Her hair is cut all the way back to the nape of her neck and her ears have been pierced at least five times on each ear. Underneath the cloak, she was wearing a simple, rough shirt and what appears to be breeches not unlike his. Except they are soaked with the Svartalf’s oil.

Sigrun gives him a winning smile “Mind if I borrow your sheath again?” and produces the thing from her side “I haven’t got Little Sis’s case right now and this thing is a pain to carry on horseback. Deer back. Stag’s back or whatever.”

“Sure.” croaks Emil.

After stashing her weapon, she mounts Stag’s back without help and scoots right up close to him so that he is no longer afraid of pitching off to the side. Lalli climbs onto Lynx’s back and urges him forwards with a tug on the ear.

“Follow me.”

“Where are we going?” asks Stag.

“Somewhere safe,” says Lynx “Hopefully.”

Sable pops out of Sigrun’s collar again to offer her two cents “You know what makes me want to smack you upside the head, Lynx? It’s when you’re all vague and mysterious like that. It’s when you know something the rest of us don’t and you’re so fucking pleased about it you can barely contain your joy.”

Sigrun looks down in an expression of pleasant surprise “I forgot my soul manifested as a Sable. How you doing?”

“Not so bad, considering we got saved at the last second from being eaten by demons from Hel’s impacted colon.”

Emil wants to say something too, but he is too tired. His whole body has grown heavy and impossible to move. He tries to call out to Lalli, to tell him the Svartalf’s poison must still be in him and is about to claim him, but his eyes close without his permission and he falls into the blackness of what he is sure is death.

 

Emil sits up and stretches with a wide yawn. Tuuri looks up from Mikkel’s bunk, where she’s perched with a book in her lap and Kitty on her shoulders like a purring scarf.

“Sweet dreams?” she asks.

Emil shrugs “If I dreamed, I can’t remember a thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As the 100 prompt challenge starts to wind down, I'm thinking about picking up this little canon in particular to write as a full story. Let me know what you guys think. Should I go for it? There will be better plotting and explanation and it won't happen in Y90, but what do you guys think?


	87. 66: Traps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a calm afternoon in the Tank

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, I'm not even sure where this prompt is supposed to go. I just wanted to try a prompt with the characters genderbent, so this is how it turned out.
> 
> (question, why didn't I call Emil's genderbend Emilia? Because I was going to then I discovered Esbjorna was a name and I thought 'yes tiny awkward lady Emil going through life named 'divine bear' is perfect and I declare it shall be', so here we are.

These days are rare. The days when there is no need to venture into the Silent World and no need to scout. When no one has to lead the camp-site and everyone is free to help Mikkela with whatever she decides needs doing around the camp.  
Today, she sticks the Hotakainens on laundry duty. It’s a strange thing to see. Normally Lalli will be tucked away out of sight, asleep under a bunk or casting judgemental looks at her team-mates from some secluded shadow. Stranger than that is the fact that she smiles while wrestling sheets into submission, the pegs in her teeth until she needs them. Tuuri chatters away in Finnish. He does not seem to have a plot or a narrative. He just fills the air between himself and his cousin with pleasantries to let her know how glad he is that they are both alive, even though they are so far from home, and today is calm enough for time to be spent on such mundane tasks as hanging out the bedsheets to dry.

Kitty has emerged from his favourite sunbeam in the cockpit to chase his tail. Each time the tip of red-white fuzz flicks out of his way, he grows more vicious and determined, and sometimes shrieks like a small demon in frustration at his prey.   
Reynhildur sits on a flat rock with paper in her lap, a pen in between her lips and an expression of profound confusion as she tries to work out the proper combination of runes to ward off hypothermia. Her hair is loose at the moment. Having incredibly long, voluminous curly hair is difficult any time, but especially so when one wants to hunch over without having said volumes of hair falling into their eyes every other second. Reynhildur is determined to let her hair free from the usual braid, however, so every now and then there will be a sputter and a whine of distress as she chokes on a strand or inhales a few locks.

A little ways away from the frustrated mage, Mikkela is bent over a long, pale arm with a curved needle and an irritated expression.

“Don’t say it.” she says sharply.

Sigmt flashes her a winning grin. The only sign of the pain he must be feeling as she changes his stitches (with no anaesthetic, no less) are the tears standing in his eyes- and those he cannot help. A natural reflex.

“Can I say it?” he presses.

Mikkela swabs a few beads of blood away from the newest stitch with a piece of gauze “Sig, didn’t your parents ever teach you not to torment a medic with a needle in her hand?”

“They might have said something like that. I’m gonna say it.”

“I cannot be held responsible for my reaction if you say it again.”

“You’re shit at stitches.”

Mikkela straightens up and flicks him between the eyes. Sigmt falls back, laughing. 

“But you are!” he exclaims “Look at those! It looks more like you’re drawing a weird skeleton on my arm than stitching me up! Whew, this is gonna be my most embarrassing scar without a doubt. When people ask ‘hey how’d you get that scar’ I won’t even be able to talk about sacrificing my wrist for a hapless shepherd. I’m gonna have to talk about how shit the medic was with stitches.”

Whatever death-threat Mikkela is going to say is interrupted when Esbjörna pops her head out of the tank and asks “Has anyone seen my flame-thrower?”

“Check the cockpit!” calls Tuuri “I think I sat on it this morning.”

She emerges a moment later with the weapon and a cleaning kit in tow, and plants herself on the ground beside the Hotakainens. The sheets flap into her face every now and then. While Esbjörna disassembles her weapon and opens up her cleaning kit, Kitty spots a new and more interesting thing to chase than his tail. He flings himself over the cleaning rags and brushes with a mewl of vicious delight, nipping playfully at the Cleanser’s hands.

“Get off.” Esbjörna flaps her hands ineffectually at him, unwilling to push him away “Seriously, Kitty, I’m working. Go on.”

Kitty flings himself at the strings of the apron Lalli is just hanging up. with a firm purchase in the strings, Kitty is hefted into the air along with the apron and swings gently about half a foot above the ground.  
Lalli regards the extra-weight with her typical disgust- she and the cat have found ways to get along, but are not yet terribly practiced in them, nor is either one overly eager to improve the relationship with more devoted practice. They exist in an uneasy truce that might snap at any moment if one were to push the other too hard. For example, if Kitty were to drag down the apron Lalli is trying to hang up. Which he is. The amount of restraint it takes Lalli not to swat the stinker with a wet sock is incredible.

“Is it just me or is it really humid today?” says Reynhildur after a long while bent over her runes.  
She looks up, her pale face flushed a colour not unlike her hair from so long concentrating. 

“What did she say?” asks Sigmt.

“She said it’s hot again.”

“Sick weather. Tell her I said it’s the Rash playing with the weather.”

Mikkela looks up at Reynhildur “Sigmt says he would be happy to remove your skin for you, if you think that may do something to ease your discomfort.”

Reynhildur blanches and peeps “Um, no thank you.” she plunges back into her runes with a sheaf held in front of her face, to avoid meeting Sigmt’s eyes.

“Why’s she looking at me like that? Or not looking at me like that?”

The medic shrugs “Who knows?”

As soon as Tuuri has finished hanging up his half of the laundry, he rips his coat off.   
“Will anyone be offended if I take off my shirt?” he asks, grabbing the hem of his shirt.

“No.”

“No.”

“Only if I get to do it too.” this is Esbjörna “I’m steaming in my own sweat over here. Will anyone be offended if I-” a discarded undershirt lands on her head “-take off my shirt as well. Tuuri, you’re being gross.”

“Hey I think you look better when your face is hidden.”

Another discarded shirt comes back in retaliation. Tuuri is completely bare-chested and noticeably sucking in his gut. His ample figure billows out of his trousers about the waist, like cake batter spilling over the edge of a mixing bowl.   
Esbjörna shares none of his embarrassment about her body. Most of her is muscle, thanks to her training with the Cleansers and these last months spent fending off surprise sparring-matches with Sigmt, and what of her is not muscle is not much of an excess. There are some obvious rolls collected underneath her bra cups, which delights the Kitty, who abandons the apron strings to push his face into the new, squishy warmth that has just been revealed.

“Alright, your arm is done – no comments, please.”

Sigmt stretches out his freshly stitched arm and casts over it a look that is both disparaging and appreciative “Not even a thank you?”

“No. I don’t want to be thanked for that hack job. I’ll admit it. I cannot do stitches. I don’t need you to tell me-”

He pats her on the shoulder “Thank you, medic.”

Mikkela closes her eyes and breathes deeply. She is the second eldest of a group of eight children and quite accustomed to being needled. Especially by those younger than her. Sigmt is eighteen months younger, but can be trusted to act like a teenager when it comes to his sense of humour. Honestly it sometimes feels like she has gained yet another younger brother. As if the four she already has are not irritating enough.

With the medical duties finished, the laundry done and the cat momentarily distracted by Esbjörna stomach, there is little left to do. Work, of course, the books and the maps need to be pored over and translated from their crumbling pages. However, this is not the kind of afternoon that should be spent inside, with a book or no.  
The winter weather has been usurped by a random bout of spring weather (a symptom of the Rash that the environment itself suffers from) and the sky is a clear, robin’s egg blue. Lethargy has pinned most of the crew to a circle of to the immediate outside of the Tank or the grass around it. 

After an hour in the sun, Reynhildur has already begun to peel like a scratched tree. She is forced to cover up with a sun-hat that causes Tuuri no end of amusement.

The two of them sit on the windshield and hood of the Tank. Tuuri still shuns his shirt, but Reynhildur has kept hers on to avoid losing an entire layer of skin.

“I shed like a snake,” she is telling Tuuri “One summer there was so much sun- I swear, I must have left a complete cast of myself in toasted skin in at least three different fields. My face turned completely red. My dogs knew me by scent, of course, but I could tell they didn’t quite know my face. They kept barking at me like barking hard enough was going to fix it.”

“That’s really gross.” says Tuuri, without judgement “Are all people with red hair like that?”

“I think so. I knew a Syrian kid with really dark skin and red hair, so he never burned in the sun. But his skin was light enough to bust out in freckles every time he was in the fields with me.”

“Lalli gets freckles too. We’ve all got such pale skin. When she’s out in the sun for more than, like, ten minutes, this massive streak of freckles crops up,” Tuuri draws a finger across the bridge of his nose “It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. They’re there then they’re not. She’s weird.”

Reynhildur swivels and glances at Lalli, who is on her back in the grass, her arms and legs in a shape that reminds her of the cross-thing she saw in that church she and Onni found in the dreamscape.   
“So she wears her hood all the time to keep the sun from, um, freckling her like crazy?”

“Yeah. That and it’s like a safety blanket. She’s weird.”

“I like your cousin,” says Reynhildur “Don’t you like her?”

Tuuri considers this for a moment “Well I love her, sure.”

A ways away, Lalli can hear what they’re saying. She cannot understand the language of course but she knows Tuuri is talking about her. He has a special tone she uses when discussing her and her weirdness. A tone that she knows from the biology classes. A teacher would stand at the front of the classroom and speak in a cold and clinical tone while the students poked small animals apart to understand what was going on in the animal anatomy.   
Tuuri sounds like that. Cold and clinical and a little curious. Minimal affection. How does one feel affection for a little dead thing they have just cut and sliced apart and had to explain to someone in exhausting detail? It gets tiresome. It gets sickening. It gets old and when it gets old it stays old, and no enthusiasm can be summoned for the subject any longer.

Also he always adds this apologetic little peep at the end- sounds like ‘of course I love her’, to make sure the people he discusses her with know that he is not a heartless bastard.  
Whatever. Lalli is comfortable right now. Should she need to make herself any more comfortable, she can shoo Kitty away from Es’s lap and settle down there. Es doesn’t mind. Her chest has to be the softest material on the planet and yet she does not mind when they are employed as a pillow. Sometimes, the gods are kind. Sometimes, they hand Lalli a break. 

Every now and then there is an afternoon she can spend on her back in comfortable weather, surrounded by people she is just getting comfortable with. No scouting to do. Nothing to kill. Not even a cat chewing on her hair.  
Today is nice.

Mikkela steps gingerly over Lalli. She has never seen her so still and sleepy. Completely relaxed. Must be one of those mage things. Getting closer to nature and all that.  
What does she do with herself now? There is nothing to do. There are no chores or wounds to fix. All she can think to do is to join Sigmt on the rock that Reynhildur sat on earlier. She shoos him to the side with a few quick smacks on the shoulder.

“How are we doing on painkillers?”

“Do you need some?”

He scoffs as if she has just offered him a full dose of local anaesthetic for a paper-cut “No. But I know what’s coming and I know how many people are going to need some doses soon.”

Mikkela snorts “I’m impressed you’ve got it memorised. The schedules.”

“It makes a lot of extra work. Hygiene, tracking the smell of fresh blood everywhere. That’s the only thing difficult about working with women and trolls. The period.”

Mikkela snorts explosively into cupped palms “You had better not tell any other woman that. Anyone who doesn’t know you would think you’re talking about PMS.”

“I’m still not even sold on that as a thing.”

Behind them, with perfect timing, Tuuri and Reynhildur burst out laughing. Lalli turns on her stomach and covers her ears with her hood. Esbjörna is still working on her machine. Kitty sinks ever deeper into her stomach. He can be heard purring from the other side of the clearing.

“I swear, afternoons like these are traps.”

“Traps?” repeats Mikkela quizzically.

“Too calm. Something’s going to happen.” Sigmt lays back on the rock and knits his hands over his scarred stomach “I can feel it in my bones.”

“You sound like my grandmother. Both of them.”

But the day wears on and on and on, still peaceful, still quiet, still one of those dozy afternoons that melts into a calm evening that does not seem as if it should have any business existing in the Silent World. For once, Sigmt’s suspicions prove to be unfounded.   
Just for once.


	88. 87: Food

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which something tries to make a meal out of Lalli and Lalli does not put up the best of fights

Grandma Hotakainen was, like her youngest grandson, sparing with her words. Jealous, even. She rarely spoke and when she did it was either to ask when dinner was going to be ready, where in Tuonela’s blessed name she left her glasses or to impart a profound wisdom to her grandchildren. She was fond of doing that.  
If ever she caught one of them alone and relatively unguarded, she descended like a matronly hawk, swept the child up into a cloaked embrace and filled their ears with horror while she bounced them gently on her knees.

Lalli was the fastest of the three of them. The moment his toddler legs figured out the rudiments of self-propulsion and direction, he zipped around the village like a wild foaI.  
Meanwhile, Tuuri was still figuring out how to get her shoes on the right feet and Onni’s childhood asthma had yet to give up its vice-grip on his lungs. When he heard the snap of her raven-black cloak in the wind and the thud of those boots, thick enough to crush troll skulls, with a thin grey residue on the soles from doing exactly that, he could only send a small plea up to Ukko that she was not about to hand him his nightmares for the week.

Rare was the occasion when she caught the third and smallest Hotakainen. Perhaps when he stirred from a nap or when he had absolutely no warning that she was around. For example, if she ambushed him with her stories while he played alone at the edge of the forest. Or if she supped with the family and cornered Lalli in the pantry, shortly before dinner, to tell him about the first time she stared death in the face, or whatever.

One occasion sticks in his mind in particular. A frustrating memory. Mainly because the weathered face of his grandmother remains so clear in his mind, while his father is a vague impression of sharp cheekbones and brown hair, his mother completely lost but for a memory of large arms and calloused hands that always seemed to be snatching him away from some trouble or another.  
And yet he can see his grandmother. In the orange light of a sunset over the lake. Her face aimed down at him, the love unmistakable in her eyes even for one as clumsy with emotions as Lalli.

“Lempo has many faces,” she told him. He can feel a slight swell of vertigo in his stomach as she pops him up and down on her knee “A face for each of us. Two people may see him together and they will not see the same thing. They will not hear the same thing. Lempo may speak and appear to two people, to many people, as a different beast with a different tongue, and all of this at the same time. I have seen the face Lempo has prepared for me.”

Because he was young, Lalli asked “What face?”

She continued as if he had not spoken “You will one day, child. I pray you will know the face he has for you. But not now. When you are old and have lived well, as I have.”

The memory ends there and picks up later in the night, when Lalli heard the distant crunch of the wall falling and Onni snatched him from underneath his bed and ran away with him and Tuuri into the night.  
Sometimes he wonders if his grandmother imparted this last bit of wisdom because she knew he would need the warning. The outside world was about to engulf him and his cousins whole. He needed to know he should be afraid. Whether or not Grandma Hotakainen knew what she was doing, she did it; she made Lalli wary and distrustful of the world to a fault. The attack on his village only confirmed what she had told him. 

The world was cruel. Lempo worked tirelessly to ensure this was so.

Lalli used to think he had seen the face Lempo had made for him already. What else can he call what he saw in Mikkeli? What other word is there for the return to a village that slept peacefully an hour before, but is now just a smear of smoke and blood and a faint crackle of fire underneath all the screaming?  
What other word but the profane name of the most profane of the gods?

Well, there must be one, because Lalli knows for sure that what he is seeing now is surely the face Lempo perfected to represent his darkest and deepest fears.

 

Lalli sees the spider before it sees him. And before Emil sees it, so naturally, Emil is a little put out when Lalli seizes him by the collar and drags him back the way they came.

“What the-” is all he understands of the outburst of indignant Swedish.

Lalli is concerned he may swallow his tongue if he tries to speak. All he can think about is the creep of a set of bristly legs up the back of his spine and neck and the prick of poison fangs at the nape of his neck.  
Spiders. It would have had to be spiders, wouldn’t it? Lempo couldn’t pick another one of Lalli’s milder fears or paranoias, like getting stuck in an elevator with a bunch of strangers, or any food that is blue or not being able to take care of his nail hygiene. There are so many other disgusting, mortal fears Lempo could have manifested, but in his unholy wisdom he has to pick the limping, poison-swollen, eight-legged thing that looks like it crawled out of Lowayatar’s rotten womb.

Before Lalli can complete the escape he has planned through the third-story window, the Swede in tow proves himself a difficult burden. He manages to stop Lalli. It is probably an easy task because it is only adrenaline and sheer terror that has kept Lalli’s legs going out from under him. So the moment Emil shows the slightest bit of resistance, Lalli has to let him go and fall to the old floorboards like his legs are made out of melted cheese.

The world swims in and out of focus. Like the sun, Emil rises in the centre and stares down at him.

Lalli tries unsuccessfully to point at the corner they have just flown around. Speech is beyond him.

“Are you ok?” asks Emil.

The urge to kick Emil in the forehead strikes Lalli. If his legs were not completely dead, he may have actually caved in.  
Why? Why, why, why does Emil ask things so obvious when the answer is literally splayed at his feet, attempting with all their might not to have a screaming panic attack.

The scratch of long, bristly legs on old floorboards. Emil flinches and glances over his shoulder. He makes a noise that is somewhere between a strangled scream and the distressed peep Kitty makes when she is not allowed to finish the food scraps from dinner. Lalli manages to turn his head to the side.  
The second time he sees it, the spider is all the more terrifying. He notices things he did not notice before. The crest of white human bone shards sticking out of its bulbous back. The spark of hungry intelligence in the eight sour-milk eyes. Also the spider is about the size of Reynir’s luonto. Big as a sheepdog

His brain cannot take it. Survival mode or not, he just cannot take it. Seasoned scout and survivalist or not, Lalli just cannot cope with the giant monstrosity skittering towards him.   
He blacks out.

The next thing he knows, he is outside in the snow, the warmth of an enormous fire is at his back and Emil’s palm is bearing down on him.

Lalli catches his wrist at the last second “What?”

Emil says a lot of things. Most of them are panicked and nonsensical and would be nonsensical even if Lalli did understand Swedish.  
All he catches is “were dead” and “burned it”. Eventually, he covers Emil’s mouth. With his other hand he pats Emil on the head to let him know everything appears it is going to be alright and then, this time with decidedly more grace, passes out again.

 

“That makes a lot of sense, actually.” 

“Does it?” Emil glances over his shoulder into the bunkroom for perhaps the fifteenth time in five minutes, just to make sure Lalli hasn’t disappeared from his bunk “Can you run through it one more time.”

Tuuri sighs “I will if you actually listen to me this time. Look at me too. Lalli isn’t going anywhere.”

“I hope not.” says Mikkel “I’ve never seen such a hysterical reaction to a phobia before. That was something spectacular.”

The other Hotakainen shrugs “He’s always been like that about spiders. They just put the fear of the gods in him. I don’t know why. One time he found a spider in the bath. For the rest of the year he used the stream by the house to bathe- mind, this was in Saimaa, so he had to, like, bathe with wildlife. I think he had to fight a bear to keep his bathing territory.”

Sigrun clears her throat “Well I’m not surprised. We’re all under a lot of stressed. We’re trapped in a bubble of metal with the same people day in, day out. Lalli hates people, right?”

Tuuri nods “As a rule.”

“So on top of all this stress about having to be with a bunch of whackos he can’t fully understand yet, he’s gotta see the literal devil incarnate of his fear? Tuuri, I saw that thing. That thing was fucking huge. Size of a small dog at least.”

“I would have said a fawn.” retorts Mikkel “Or a very small doe.”

Sigrun scoffs “No way, buster, it was dog-sized.”

“Well it shrivelled somewhat by the time we saw it. What, with being on fire and all that.”

Tuuri pulls Emil a little apart from the others, towards Reynir, who is playing with Kitty on the front steps of the Tank. He is totally oblivious of the chaos going on around him. As he tends to be when he has not himself caused said chaos.

“From what you told me, I think that spider was mutated. Insects are still alive, of course, and spiders too. They still have to have diets. Swarms of flies follow the fresher trolls, but there aren’t that many fresh trolls to go around anymore. Most of them are like big pieces of frozen blood. So the spiders have to get creative, right? They have to start taking chunks off the hosts of their original prey. I think the giant spider you had to burn had survived off troll meat. Even though spiders aren’t mammals, ingesting that stuff is going to do, well, stuff to the system, right?”

His stomach turns a few dozen times. Emil has to lean on Tuuri’s shoulder to prevent a dramatic face-plant into the snow.  
“So,” he almost gags on the words “So you think the spider thing was trying to eat me and Lalli because we were fresh?”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that! You’re probably right!” she says brightly.

“Tuuri, it almost got us. I swear it had him by the arm and it got me by the leg. I don’t know how I got us out of there…I mean, I do, the window, and we were three stories up- thank the gods or whatever for snow drifts…”

Tuuri gathers Emil to her in a stiff hug- she is not used to having to comfort people- and pats him mechanically on the back a few times “Hang in there. No reason to panic. I get why Lalli freaked out so bad, though.”

Emil shrugs out of the awkward hug “Why?”

“Poor bastard probably thought he was looking at Lempo.”

Inside the Tank, Lalli lets out a soft whimper and turns over in his sleep.


	89. 96: In the storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Against all common sense, Emil ventures out into the first waves of a blizzard to find their absent scout.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If sad-body-horror-angst fluff is a tag, then this is some right here.

The snow begins to fall around six in the evening. 

Emil lifts his face to the sky and squints at the grey blanket unfurling overhead. He is not pleased.  
“Lalli should be back by now.”

“What was that?” calls Tuuri from the Tank.

“Why isn’t Lalli back yet?”

Tuuri appears in the doorway to shrug, utterly nonplussed “He’ll be back when he’s back.”

“You aren’t worried?” seems incredibly irresponsible of Tuuri not to worry, with weather like the blizzard the clouds threaten. In a place like this Silent World.

“No, frankly, not really. He did this all the time in Keuruu.”

“That was Keuruu.” Emil points out as civilly as possible. Tuuri tends to bristle when people don’t agree with her.

“And this is a bigger, denser version of Keuruu. He’s a night scout. He’s made to go out in the night like this. You’re worrying over nothing.”

Emil doubts this. He sincerely doubts Tuuri has taken the right stance to this whole situation. The blizzard will unsheathe its claws at any moment and then where will Lalli be? In the same place where he is right now: a dark and unfamiliar wood, surrounded by dark and familiar monsters. No matter how much snow is dumped on these things, warm blood and a panicked heart-beat will stir them and spur them into action.  
Emil doesn’t care how competent Lalli is, how magical and powerful. There is no way he is going to leave his friend in that kind of situation.

He retreats inside as the winds pick up and the tree-tops roar. Kitty loops herself around his ankles, but he does not stoop to pet her, much to her annoyance. He goes to the study where the books are piled and Sigrun can be trusted to be found sharpening a weapon or pestering Mikkel- generally doing both, because she spreads her sharpening or cleaning materials all over the transcripts of the books he has just finished.  
His suspicions prove correct; Sigrun sits behind Mikkel with her feet propped up on his shoulders, who’s at his desk, ignoring the heels which are perched on each of his shoulders. Sigrun’s toenails are the same bright sky-blue of Tuuri and Reynir’s fingernails, which means they must have roped her into the latest ‘fun with cosmetics Tuuri found in an old dead place!’ session. Emil has resisted them so far. It’s only a matter of time until he is ambushed. 

“Ah-” is all Emil gets out.

“Do you really need to go?” asks Sigrun. Her eyes meet his. Before meeting her, Emil did not know people could have violet eyes.

Kitty hops up on Mikkel’s desk and disturbs most of the papers in her effort to be petted.

“I think so. I think I do.”

“I’ll go through the perfunctory arguments. He’s a big boy. He can handle a little storm and a few trolls. He’ll come back safe. Blah blah, blah.” Sigrun digs into her pocket and brings out a small lump of yellow wool “Here, take this.”

“What?”

“Reynir’s been knitting. Apparently he never travels without at least five spools of yarn, the adorable freak. This is a little sweater for Kitty.”

Accepting the sweater, Emil stretches it out by the topmost and longest sleeves, which he assumes are for the forearms. There are booties for the feet, with thoughtfully included little holes roughly corresponding to where her claws will need to come out, though Emil is sure Kitty is happy to poke them out of the mesh of the wool. And, of course, a big pink heart patterned on each flank.

“Why am I holding this?”

“You’re taking the cat.” Mikkel lifts the cat up “I’ll help you wrestle her in.”

This struggle only lasts about two minutes. Kitty is delighted to have her own, body-length sweater to cosy into, even more so when Emil zips her into the front of his shirt. Warmth and human and sweater. All is good in Kitty’s world.

While they negotiate her limbs gently into the sleeves and paw-booties, Emil listens to Tuuri and Reynir in the cockpit. They chatter in rapid-fire Icelandic. It all sounds very cheerful and good-hearted and Reynir laughs after every other sentence. Briefly, Emil wonders if he is indeed being ridiculous. He could push his fears for Lalli to the back of his mind and join the other two in the cockpit. Recently he has discovered he enjoys watching Reynir talk, though he does not understand a word. It’s simply because Reynir uses his hands when he talks, he smiles all the way up to his eyes and punctuates with a shy laugh.  
When most of his day is given over to hunting trolls or being hunted by them while he scavenges, the unwavering cheer and warmth Reynir throws off is a welcome break. Like watching the cat chase her tail. 

But what really shears the edge off his day, he realises, is being able to do this while Lalli’s back is pressed into his shoulder, and the scout reclines on him, dozing lightly, sometimes tilting his face back to check Emil has no intentions of moving on him. It is this and the gentle tugs Lalli will occasionally give his ponytail to ask him to move out of his way, or else to hand him something. And when his eyes catch Lalli’s and finds there is something like a smile in those silver depths.  
It is the fact that Lalli has never called him by his name, preferring instead to use these gestures, these looks, the tiny smiles interspersed between them, because this is his language and he teaches Emil bit by bit, and Emil cannot let Lalli stay out in a darkening night when he knows these lessons are incomplete.

“If I’m not back in an hour, come looking. Sorry about this.”

Sigrun makes a shooing motion “Scat, Em. I don’t want to see you again without Lalli.”

The weather, fortunately, has not worsened by much by the time Emil exits for the second time. This time he closes the door. A blizzard is on its way. The cold will be eager to suck every modicum of warmth out of the Tank, so they had better get a good convection current going on before the generator has to strain against Arctic winds and polar snows.

Emil flicks on his flash-light and scans the tree-line twice. There are no bright eyes to gleam in the flashlight, or ragged scraps of infected flesh and pelt between the trunks, and nothing to rustle the undergrowth. 

There was a time when Emil would have never dreamed of doing this- except in bouts of childish fantasy about future heroisms. At this moment, though, the danger which this trip poses to him barely registers in his mind. All he can think about is retrieving his friend.  
If that younger, dreaming version of himself was able to see what Emil is doing now without hesitation, he would not believe this was the person he would become.

The only thing that troubles Emil- really, legitimately sticks in his mind and prevents him from thinking clearly- is the question of why Sigrun and Mikkel have let him go out on his own like this. Obviously, Tuuri is too jaded to the dangers of the Silent World from being cooped up inside the Tank. All the action she sees is through the windshield of the Tank, with Lalli directing her around the biggest obstacles on one side and Sigrun offering murder-advice on the other on the odd occasion a troll does wander into the road.

She has no idea of the carnage. No idea of the sadness that casts a grey pall over this greyer world. While Tuuri has seen what may lope out of the wilds to hunt, she has never seen the desperate, hunched things, too weak or sick to move themselves beyond the city, starving for a taste of the flesh that was all eaten by infection before they had a chance to sample it.  
Sigrun and Mikkel have. And they’re letting Emil brave these monsters on his own? They are less than ten kilometres from the outskirts of a major metropolitan area. These woods are no doubt teeming with the sickness. Either they are eager to ease the rate at which the rations are being consumed, or they trust Emil a little more than Emil trusts himself.

The beam of the flashlight cuts through the shadows. Underneath this canopy of ever-greens, the snow that filters through is the smaller stuff. The light and fluffy stuff you could not tell apart from sugar or salt crystals if it was strewn across a countertop, until the snow began to melt.

The cold tries to cut through him, but his layers are not having any of it. One of the things Reynir has contributed to the mission, aside from red hairballs and weird runes drawn over everything, is his ability to knit and the seemingly unending spools of yarn his bag contains. Everyone has a sweater now. Before, in these sub-arctic temperatures, Emil would have at least been shivering through his clothes.  
He is sure this sweater must be enchanted in some way. Kitty’s too, because she looks about as comfortable as she does when she sits on top of the space-heater. As long as Kitty doesn’t break out into a hissing and spitting fit Emil figures he is alright.

And he is. For what proves to be the longest fifteen minutes of his life, Emil is totally alone and free to imagine whatever fate for Lalli his cruel subconscious can invent. He imagines finding nothing at all. He imagines finding only a pool of blood, so fresh it still steams in the snow. There may be limbs scattered in the snow, or scraps of Lalli’s cloak, or a boot, or both, with the legs inside.  
Worst of all, he could happen across Lalli in repose. Quiet and looking all for the worlds like he has gone to sleep. But he’ll be frozen to the touch, unresponsive to Emil’s pleas.

The way he finds Lalli turns out to be far more tranquil.

Emil reaches the top of possibly the gentlest slope he has ever trekked (Denmark is so flat it astounds him) and rounds the base of a large pine tree, and sees Lalli tucked into the gnarled branches of the rowan tree beside the pine. Definitely an enchanted tree. Tuuri told him once that trees who have hosted a näkki at one point are rewarded for their hospitality by becoming impervious to the change of the seasons. Should the tree chose, it may remain in the full bloom of summer or spring for the rest of its natural life span.

Lalli’s legs are crossed underneath him. His hands are folded on his ankles. 

Emil does not call out. The whistle of the wind masking what little noises his boots do make on the powdery snow on the ground. The flashlight’s beam avoids Lalli. It does not wish to touch him. Because he, apparently like most mages, throws off his own phosphorescence, Emil switches the light off and stows it in a deep pocket. He barely notices a difference.

Lalli’s eyes are fixed on a huge crumpled form in the snow. Emil knows what it is without looking, but even so, he has a particularly potent sense of dread for the dead heap in the corner of his eye.  
At last, when Emil is perhaps two steps away, Lalli looks up.

He is surprised to see him.

“Storm’s coming.” says Emil. He wants to say many other things instead, but what he chooses seems the most sensible.

Lalli doesn’t answer. He merely gathers himself to the corner of the pocket of roots, making room for Emil.   
The threat of the storm fades to the back of Emil’s mind. As long as Lalli is alright, he figures they will come up with something to get them back to the Tank.

He sits beside him. The pocket is not quite big enough for two grown men. They are not quite grown men yet, but there is precious little room to move even so. Not that either of them will complain.

When Emil has settled in the pocket, Kitty begins to stir. The only part of her that is not engulfed in wool- her face, her ears and a little circle of fur about her face- bristle and fuzz so that she looks like a red dandelion seed. But she does not hiss. She knows something is nearby, but not close enough to be of immediate danger.

“We had better-”

Lalli points to the dark shape Emil has been trying not to look at. He is forced too, now, and will wish he had not looked for the rest of his life. 

There are certain things survivors of the Rash do not let themselves consider. Even the newest generations like the two sheltering in the roots of the rowan tree feel the grief of the lost world as fresh- after all, the harbingers of that grief scratch at the walls of their homes every night. The Rash is not discussed. Trolls are not discussed, except among military circles.  
And even among these circles certain topics are never approached. For example, what might have happened to those that could not get away.

Dogs left tethered to their front yards. Pets stuck in houses. Horses abandoned in paddocks. Cows locked and unmilked in barns. Zoo animals- those that did not escape to become infected anyway. Prisoners whose cells were never unlocked, mental patients whose rooms were never opened, those in hospitals, who could not move from their life support, their casts and their beds, the elderly who had no others to check up on them or offer aid when the inevitable came, the homeless, who never had shelter to begin with, the orphaned and disenfranchised who could rely on nothing and no one when the sickness struck and broke a system which had historically failed them already, the pregnant women, the people in wheelchairs, the people trapped in apartments, the people trapped in elevators when the lights went dark for the last time in their cities and the children, and the babies.

Emil used to dream about the babies. He used to dream that he walked a white, sterile corridor, the sort which could only exist in the old world. On either side of him babies cried and whined and burbled. There were windows, but they were fogged. He could not see through.  
He could only hear them. He would walk for hours and hours and kilometre upon kilometre and never reach the end, never take a step without some mewl or gurgle to accompany him. Sometimes he would look down at himself and realise his hands were covered in blood.

This dream will be shortly replaced by a much fouler one. Emil’s eyes adjust to Lalli’s light and start to pick out the shapes. These shapes quickly commit themselves to his memory. Indelible. Waiting patiently behind his eyelids each time he sleeps. 

“Gods.” he whispers, and pushes his face into Lalli’s shoulder. He cannot look at it.

Lalli’s arms wrap around him. Kitty’s fur gradually begins to fall flat. Her low growl fades to an uncertain stuttering purr. Emil does not lift his face from Lalli’s shoulder. He does not want to think. He does not want to breathe. He does not ever want to move in this disgusting, cruel world, and wants to purge every foul second of existence here from his memory.

“I forget,” says Lalli “they were us. Then I remember.”

It is unclear which of them is the first to move. Might even be Kitty, who is uneasy with the corpse so close. As one, they stand. Lalli slings an arm around Emil’s shoulder. Emil loops an arm around Lalli’s waist.  
The snow is falling heavy and thick by the time they reach the Tank, but not once do they let go of each other until they are inside, and even then, they will not suffer to part for very long for the rest of the night.


	90. 21: Vacation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lalli returns to the village of his birth for the first time since he left it. He wishes he didn't have to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some more world-exploration combined with Hannu (which Hannu, they ask, is their son just named Hannu and the actual Hannu is the one who was Lalli's father, how many freaking Hannus do you need in one story) combined with light Emilalli fluff. Standard stuff, really, though I seem to have misplaced my sense of humour in this one.

Onni told him the tree by the river marked the borders of their home, swearing he would tan Lalli’s skin and make it into a winter jacket if Lalli went past it. Not understanding irony or figurative language, Lalli believed him. He would pass entire afternoons sitting in that tree and staring out over the borders of Mikkeli, wondering what might be so terrifying that his cousin would rather wear him than let him pass over the borders.  
It has been over two decades since he left Mikkeli and discovered exactly what waited out there in the world. Lalli has seen it, fought it, feared it and loved some of what the world had to offer him. He returns now, in his early thirties with a child and a husband in tow, and wonders if his situation is not reversed.

Lalli does not want to return. If it were up to him, which it is decidedly not, he and his family would be at home in Mora, where the old blood of the dead of his past cannot touch him or sully his son. 

“We can go back.” says Emil as they pass the first sign. It reads in meticulous hand-writing: MIKKELI, POPULATION: 409.  
The population number has been crossed out and repainted several times.

“I’m alright.” he assures Emil, almost believing himself.

“I’m Hannu.” adds Hannu. He has been carried for most of the last mile and is getting a little restless with his desire to be put down, run around and stick his nose into the bushes and hollows of trees.

“The road…for some reason I didn’t expect the road to be in such good condition.” Emil kicks a piece of packed dirt to the stone-lined side. Rare is the occasion a mechanical vehicle uses the road, but the dirt is pock-marked with hoof-prints and the ruts left by wagon wheels. They didn’t used to have horses in Mikkeli. Lalli wonders when and why horses were brought to the village. What could they possibly be needed for, with the lake there to provide all the sustenance the village needs?

The moment Hannu sees these he wants to be put down to splash in the fetid puddles gathering in the ruts. Emil cannot say no fast enough.

Lalli shoulders his rifle, thinking on the various things which might attack his little family on the empty stretch of road.   
“It’s different from when I came up. Back then it was a game trail. I shared this road with deer and their fawns.”

“What’s a fawn?” asks Hannu.

“It’s like you, except a deer.” replies Lalli, shucking his son’s chin gently “And not as intelligent.”

Hannu smiles smugly “I’m smart, aren’t I?”

His fathers respond in unison “Very.”

The closer they get to Mikkeli, the more signs there are of human life. An axe left to lean on a half-cut tree while its owner takes a break in the woods. Boot-prints and the odd marker, where someone has died at the edge of the road. The distant smell of smoke. A child’s thin wail drifts over the tree-tops.  
Lalli notices a trees have craters, round puncture wounds lined by splinters, marking where bullets struck when they missed their targets. He should not have brought them in summer. He wishes he could do otherwise. But the tradition demands he introduce his son to the head of the family at the summer solstice, or risk the wrath of the Hotakainens’ spirit ancestors at the slight. He has seen many mages destroyed by their own neglected family’s bitterness. It is one of the last things he wants for Hannu. 

He didn’t want Hannu to end up with powers of any sort either. It’s wonderful to have the connection to nature. The luonto and the feeling of security it can give you, once you know how to use it and it knows how to use you. But it’s just kind of dangerous and nerve-wracking and painful until then.

“Is everyone here magical like you?” Hannu asks him once they are close enough to Mikkeli to hear low shouts and the high-pitched screeches of children.

Lalli considers it “No, not everyone. When I lived here a lot of people were mages.”

“Magical.” Hannu corrects him.

“Yes, magical, excuse me.”

“How come just some people are magical?” Hannu looks up at Emil with a sudden suspicious glint in his eyes “How come you don’t got it, Papassen?”

Emil is stumped for a moment “Well I don’t know. I guess because the gods didn’t think I needed magic.”

“But Grandpa Trond says gods are the opium of the masses.”

“Opiate,” corrects Lalli “He says they’re the opiate. Grandpa Trond can go suck a toad.”

“Lalli! Don’t teach him language like that.” says Emil under his breath.

They can’t admonish each other for using Hannu-inappropriate language in front of the child, otherwise he will immediately pick up the phrase or word and use it at every available opportunity. Emil says he used to do something similar as a child. His father boxed his ears every time until little-Em decided the satisfaction of the horror which dawned on his parents’ faces with every expletive was not worth the ear-pain afterwards.  
Because neither of them can bear to lay a finger on Hannu, they have to correct his expanding vocabulary through passive resistance; if he doesn’t get a rise out of them then he is eventually forced to move onto the next and most scandalous thing within his grasp.

By the time they reach the village in proper, Lalli is ready to go home.

The village rests on the edge of the adjusted borders of Saimaa and is built around the lake for which the land is named. Lalli has plenty of fond and foul memories about that lake. 

“Tuuri pushed me into the lake.” he says, randomly “Almost every day of the summer. Onni used to say I would grow gills if she kept it up. I think she was trying to see if it was true.”

Hannu giggles “Aunt Tuuri’s a caution!”

“Why didn’t you stay away from the lake?” asks Emil.

“She promised she would never do it again, every time. I never learned to stop trusting her.”

Emil’s smile is wan as he brushes some hair from Lalli’s face and kisses his temple. Hannu squeals in disgust.

To Lalli’s relief, no one looks at them twice. Except, perhaps, the women looking enviously at Emil’s ponytail and Lalli’s wedding ring, and a few of the men as well, and every single grandmother-aged woman he sees on the street pauses to admire Hannu from a distance. He doesn’t blame them; Hannu is just about the cutest thing on the face of the planet.  
No one should recognise him. What little was left of Mikkeli after the fires has drained away into the surrounding villages, or gone to far-flung foreign locations like Iceland. A scrap of the Greenlandic coast has just been liberated and Cleansed. Lalli heard from Tuuri that a lot of the older generations of Mikkeli have packed up and gone to this new colony, where the surviving Greenlanders are pooling doctors and hunters in an effort to blast the Rash from the country. A second Iceland.

And these people in the streets, the children under-foot, the dogs trailing after them, the women sharpening their daggers and the men balancing heavy baskets of laundry and fish from the lake- they are all new. Most of them have been re-housed after the Joensuu disaster.   
Lalli has not returned to his home as a stranger. His home became a stranger while he was away. No one knows him, and Lalli knows no one. With Emil’s bright hair covered in a hood and his own face hidden away in a deeper, darker hood, they will not be recognised from the Long Winter. As far as Mikkeli knows these new arrivals are just a young married couple out for an afternoon stroll with their son.

The buildings are all new, made of bricks and domestic timber, with glass windows in every frame where there used to be heavy shutters packed with mud in the winter to keep out the cold. Most everything was burnt down before he left, but gods, he did not expect the place to be so foreign. After all the time he spent growing up in this village he barely knows it now.

His childhood can be separated into two distinct eras; before Onni took care of him and when Onni started to take care of him. Even the time pre-Onni seems like it is dominated by Onni. He did more childcare than a teenager should have had to. Every lesson hammered into his head, from touching troll corpses to eating yellow snow, Lalli hears in Onni’s stern and mirthless voice.  
What did his parents think of him when he was born? Could they tell right away that there was something different about their son? They certainly would have noticed once he got old enough to talk. Onni knew. Onni did not think it was something to be encouraged or discourage, and told Lalli as much.

“This is just you,” he said to Lalli once “And the rest of the world has to learn to live with that, because there’s no reason you should change it. No way to change it either, I expect.”

Lalli watched for signs in his son of the same thing he has. But he quickly became distracted from trying to sniff out the autism in his son when Hannu took an unhealthy interest in matches. Lalli’s differences are not going to be Hannu’s differences. Hannu is going to be a pyromaniac, like Emil, which is just fucking wonderful.  
Hopefully this passion for setting things on fire will not travel into his magic.

“Where’s your house?” asks Hannu. He seems troubled by the village. 

In his own, small way, Hannu has picked up on Lalli’s unease and through that felt the pain that drenches this place. Through his father, he knows of the death. Through his father, he knows this place once burned so long and hard it scrubbed the moon from the night-sky and made Mikkeli a sun from across the lake. Lalli watched that for half a night and was never sure if the sounds he heard were screams or just the fires.

“It’s not here anymore.”

“Where’d it go?”

“Well, it got up.”

Hannu pulls a sceptical face “Huh?”

“Remember Mr Braginsky’s story about Baba Yaga? That’s what happened to my house. One day it grew chicken legs and walked off.”

Hannu shakes his head in disbelief “And took your dads?”

“I only had one dad, Hannu.”

“Was he a Papassen or an Isukki?”

“He was an Isä.”

Emil touches Lalli on the shoulder and whispers “I think someone has recognised you.”

His stomach knotting, Lalli turns and meets the intense stare of an old woman with a sword in her lap. She sits on a tree-stump at the side of the road, outside of the smithy. Lalli recognises her. He also recognises the bald man illuminated by the forge inside the smithy, though when Lalli last knew the man, he was a scrawnier teenager with a black braid.

The woman takes the eye-contact as permission to engage. She stands and approaches, the sword hanging from one hand.

“Is that a Hotakainen I see?” she says.

“Three Hotakainens.” says Hannu “Who’re you?”

Emil tells him to hush.

“Three?” repeats the woman “You’re married then?”

“Yes sir.”

The woman looks Emil up and down with the expression of someone appraising a piece of meat in a butcher’s “I know you. The Cleanser from the Long Winters. You must know all about Mikkeli from the time you two have had to talk over the Winters.”

A challenge. A question. One of the two. She wants to know- after the Hotakainens left the ruin their grandmother had made, did they speak of what had happened? Did they speak of the obscene thing that followed them away from the smoke and the blood?  
Or did they bury it with Mikkeli’s dead?

“Emil, this is Ms Rautio. She ran the smithy when I was a child. I believe her son does now.”

Ms Rautio glances over her shoulder and seems mildly surprised and annoyed to find her son stooped over the forge “He’s useless. He can’t smith a dagger like I can. I held out on passing the forge on for the longest time, but I just couldn’t lift the damn hammer one morning.”

Struck by something which is either nostalgia or a desire to prove he has remained loyal to Mikkeli in his own way, Lalli slides his dagger from the sheath and passes it to Ms Rautio.

She raises an eyebrow “You kept this?”

“I’ll keep it as long as it works.”

“Gods. For some reason it never occurred to me that one of my daggers might be on the mission. Your cousins- are they still using their old weapons?”

“Tuuri prefers to drive the Tank over things which annoy her now.” he pauses to let the woman laugh “And Onni has his cross-bow.”

“Oh, he took up archery again? I remember when he was a boy. You couldn’t go into the woods for fear of having the Hotakainen boy put an arrow in one of your buttocks.”

Hannu bursts out suddenly, unable to keep himself silent any longer “I’m a magical.”

Ms Rautio passes the dagger back to Lalli “So you’re here to meet your family then? To introduce a new mage?”

The boy shakes his head “No, they went away with Baba Yaga. I’m gonna go see the stones they put in the yard for dead people and say hi.”

Thankfully, Ms Rautio does not bother to ask for an explanation “I expect you want to know why you aren’t being recognised by everyone. You’re very good at hiding. It’s a good thing your husband has covered his hair. Everyone in the Silent World knows your golden hair, did you know that Mr Västerström?”

Emil smiles uneasily “It’s Mr Hotakainen.”

“Oh, you took his name? Pity. I liked your surname better.” Ms Rautio looks at Hannu in much the same way she looked at Emil, except more like he is a head of lettuce “And what’s your name, young man?”

“Hannu.” chirps Hannu “Like the Han-nannoo-nanoo-voo-noo-kun.”

He reaches into his collar and pulls out his pendant, showing her the hannunvaakuna he wears proudly. Ten days after Hannu was born, Lalli took off his pendant and threaded it carefully around his infant son’s wrist. Hannu wore it as an over-sized bracelet until they were sure he would not accidentally strangle himself with the cord.

“Like your grandfather too.”

“No,” says Hannu firmly “Just my necklace.”

Ms Rautio has no more questions after that. The conversation ends quietly, quickly and she retreats to her stump in much the same way. She resumes staring at the sword in her lap as if she had never moved.

Fortunately, the graveyard is as it was when Lalli left. Well, better than that, because this time he can visit his grandmother’s grave without fear of falling into an open grave. The ground is grassy, peppered with white flowers he does not know from his childhood, and altogether unbroken. No burials since at least the spring, he would guess.

Finally Hannu is put on his feet.

“Don’t come! I wanna find it by myself!”

Hannu has just learned to read his own name and is extremely proud of this. He exercises the new skill at every opportunity.

While their son darts among the low stone markers, Emil takes Lalli’s hand and closes the gap between them. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder. When they were young men, this was the way they always stood together. Personal boundaries melted as sugar in water. From a distance, the could have been mistaken for one large man.

“Have you thought about how you’re going to get him to sleep long enough for the ritual?”

Lalli groans “Oh, gods, I didn’t.”

“Good thing I did.” Emil produces a small cloth bag from his packet “But I’m afraid we’re going to have to drug our child.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Emil laughs “You’re awful, you know that? I have to ask, though, are you two just going to curl up on top of the grave?”

“That’s the way it’s done.”

“And no one will think it odd?”

“I don’t know. When I was young, most of this place had magic in its blood. Many of us were mages. Now, I’m not sure. I don’t recognise any of these people, and this place and the smithy are the only places that don’t look different.”

“Isukki!” Hannu straightens up behind a particularly large clump of the white flowers. His face is troubled “My name’s on this rock!”

“No, that’s your grandfather. My father.”

“Not the right one?”

“Not the right one.”

Frowning, Hannu returns to his search.

“I’ll make sure nothing happens to you while you sleep, at any rate.”

Lalli threads an arm around Emil’s waist and rests his head on his husband’s shoulder “I know. I’m alright, Em. I am.”

“Alright.”

“I found it!” cries Hannu triumphantly.

“What’s the first name?”

“Pa- panini? No, Paju!”

“That’s my mother. Keep looking. I’m sure you’re getting close.”

“What about Ville?”

“That’s Tuuri’s Isä. Keep looking.” Lalli sighs “I’ve had a thought, Em.”

“Have you?”

“Yes. Next time we take a family vacation, let’s avoid the family graveyard.”

Again, Emil laughs, and the weight of the world slips from Lalli’s shoulders by a fraction.

Hannu parts the long grass with a determined grin “I finded her- I mean found. This one says Joona Hotakainen!”

“That’s her. Well done, Hannu.”

“I know.” says Hannu “Hurry up! It’s time to do magic!”

Hannu waits impatiently as his parents step into the graveyard and join him at the side of Joona’s grave. The centre of a small clutch of graves, all of which bear the name Hotakainen.


	91. 89: Through the fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much of the credit for the leg-oriented puns goes to the wonderful people over on the Headcanon thread for picking this whacky idea up and running with it. This is both an extension of that puntastic stuff and a sudden onslaught of angst (and significant body horror) to make it conform to one of the prompts. Enjoy!

“Mikkel, can you give me a hand?”

A moment later, a prosthetic still clad in a boot and a sock arcs gracefully over Emil’s head and lands upright in the snow beside him.

“Will that do?” comes the reply on the other side of the Tank.

Emil swallows a scream and bangs his head on the side of the Tank. Patience, he tells himself, patience is a virtue and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Mikkel take mine away from me.

Still, he must admit that Mikkel’s aim is impeccable. Truly the work of a master who has spent most of the time he has had a prosthetic working on this trick. The shape of his throws are nearly always perfect parabolas. He never misses his mark and his face remains unchanged throughout the entire exchange, adding to the general dead-pan hilarity of the situation to those who are not being victimised by what they are now calling the Dread Leg.

There are several unspoken rules with the Dread Leg. First, no matter how wounded the victim may be in either pride or bruising, they must return the Dread Leg to its Dread Owner because it is Mikkel’s leg and he cannot afford to be disarmed (dis-legged) of his full faculties for very long in the Silent World.   
Second, no matter how severe the pride-wounding may be, the victim is not allowed to strike back at Mikkel. For the love of Reynir’s gods- the man lost his leg in service to the people of the Known World. Therefore, if Mikkel wants to detach his fake leg and toss it at unsuspecting team-members then it is a small way of paying him back in tiny increments for what he has quite literally sacrificed for the safety of the healthy world. 

Without explanation or questioning, everyone understands this. Even Lalli and to Lalli the whole concept of ‘unspoken rules’ make about as much sense as trying to put out fire with more fire. These he understands and tolerates, though this is probably because Mikkel prefers not to torment Lalli with his false limb. Mikkel understands there are certain things Lalli is comfortable with in terms of bonding time and having a veteran’s fake leg conk him in the back of the head when he makes some appendage-related request is not among them.

Gathering his temper, Emil calls “It’s coming back! Catch!” and tosses the leg gently over the Tank.

“Got it.” says Mikkel “Thank you. Now, what do you need help with?”   
He rounds the Tank, rolling the sleeve of one trousers’ leg back down. Emil thinks about punching Mikkel in the middle of his small, smug smile, but the weight of the Dread Rules on his shoulders stays his fist and puts a forgiving smile on his own mouth.

 

“My uncle used to make these- Lalli’s father, that is, he used to grow these prosthetics. You have an organic prosthetic, right? That’s why it comes off so easily?”

Tuuri babbles at Mikkel every chance she gets. She finds the Dread Leg utterly fascinating and heart-breaking in turns, because, as she says every time she speaks about it, her Uncle Hannu used to grow false limbs for people who had lost their limbs to battle or sickness or had never had them due to some genetic ‘whoops!’ in the womb. Her memories of the lab are vivid- it was the room beside Lalli’s bedroom, full of windows so as to let the sunlight in, and the walls were lined with spun-glass lanterns Uncle Hannu would light with red flame from his palm each night.

“When Uncle Hannu made them he would take a sample of the person’s flesh and then combine it with a snipping of plant- usually a rowan tree, because it’s holy, obviously, and the flesh of the tree is so flexible. He’d stick the flesh and the piece of plant in a cloth bag and submerge it in an enchanted bath of water, then when he pulled out these perfectly formed full limbs, all three of us kids would gather around and guess how the person had lost it in the first place,” she pokes her head through the aisle of two hanging sheets “How does yours come off? Does it still photosynthesise?”

Mikkel hands her another arm-load of socks from the steaming laundry basket “Why do you think I leave it out on the doorstep every Thursday?”

“Oh, uh, to freak us out?”

“That too, but mostly it is to allow the prosthetic to re-charge. It is an organism that is mostly independent of me-”

“The hinge, right? That hinge you always pop off before you hoik it at Emil’s head?”

“Yes- that sheet’s going to dry wrinkled that way.”

“Oh, sorry,” Tuuri straightens the sheet in question, bobbing up and down on her heels in excitement “So Uncle Hannu used to say the hinge was this gate between the venous system of the two organisms- symbiotic relationships and stuff. We learned about that in science at school. Like how a näkki will pick a place to manifest and act as the care-taker for that wood or pond or whatever, and the pond repays them by being a gracious host. The Dread Leg uses your blood for its nutrients and water and whenever you unclip the hinge thing that severs the connection-”

“And allows me to hoik the Dread Leg at Emil’s head without spewing blood from my arteries.” finishes Mikkel “Are these Sigrun’s briefs or Reynir’s?”

“I don’t know. Do they smell like sheep?”

 

Sigrun jabs a finger at the map “So according to Lal, this area’s a total bottle-neck. That cuts out this route, this route, this other one over here and basically this entire square. We’re cut off completely from the north, so I guess we’re gonna take the long way around.”

The two of them, the ‘responsible adults’ of the mission, are bent over the map. It has gotten larger and larger as they find more detailed local maps to attach, and with others that pick up where their original leaves off. All of it is covered in Tuuri's hand-writing, marking out the trolls’ nests Lalli has found. In total the current map covers about half the floor and is spread over the bottom half of Reynir. The rest of him sticks out like a big red log, his nose buried in one of the age-stained books of fairy-tales he has taken such a liking too.

“What do you think about this route?” Mikkel traces it out with his forefinger “Lalli has already been here. We know this is clear. We’ll have to make a three-point turn, but it should shave about an hour of negotiating the streets off of the trip.”

“A three-point turn? Gods, I thought those were mythical.”

“No, of course not! I’ve done plenty of them with a full fork-lift. Tuuri can manage, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know,” for once, Sigrun is the hesitant one “If this goes wrong, then this really goes wrong on us. We’ll be stuck in there with no way out that isn’t noisy as the Thunderer’s flatulence. I think we should stick to what we know can work. A big loop around the city seems safer.”

“So what you’re saying is…”

Sigrun feels a chill climb her spine. She knows what is coming. If only she knew a way to stop it.

“You would rather we…toe the line…in this situation?”

Somehow in the five or so seconds he had to prepare for this toxic combination of visual and verbal pun, he has managed to detach his prosthetic and point the largest of the vaguely toe-shaped ends, shod entirely of footwear, at the route Sigrun has suggested.

After a long moment, Sigrun lets out a deep breath “I’m not even mad. I’m just impressed you keep finding opportunities to make these puns.”

 

Mikkel is unrelenting. When Tuuri tries to climb a tree for a better vantage point and asks for a leg up, he literally throws a leg at her.  
When Reynir finds himself stumbling over the prosthetic as it ‘charges’ on the front steps, Mikkel shouts from the depths of the Tank “Would you be so kind as to stumble over your own feet please?”

Emil has another screaming foot upon discovering another, ice-cold foot in his bed.

“I wondered where that had got to,” says Mikkel as he fishes his escaped appendages out of Emil’s bedding.

Suddenly having such a familiar object around him again has made Lalli remember more of his childhood than he is happy with. Most of the time the memories sit on the surface of his thoughts, like the skin of a bubble, but with a reminder of his father’s profession that he is constantly aware of, the skin has thickened, blackened, and begun to pierce his mind in earnest.  
He knows he will shake it off. He knows he will survive the anguish attempting to seize him, but it will take some time. Until he is able to look at Mikkel and breathe normally, he elects to avoid him. Not extravagantly. He just leaves rooms when Mikkel enters them and goes out on recon-missions he is not necessarily needed on- there’s an added bonus of a little extra time with Emil, which always takes the edge off whatever mental agony that is trying to drown him.

So the Tank grows a tad quieter. The Dread Leg still flies, the accuracy as deadly as ever, but Mikkel no longer aims for conks or near misses. Reynir stops stumbling over the Dread Leg as it ‘charges’ in the sun- someone moves it to the side thoughtfully, and he is able to leave the Tank in the mornings without first face-planting into the snow.  
Emil and Lalli tend to be out of sight of the Tank even when not on missions, so it is quiet without Emil’s laugh, Lalli and Tuuri’s quiet conversations in the cockpit. Everyone has their suspicions as to what the two might be doing when they are not on an official recon or at the Tank. None of them are accurate.

What they are actually doing is sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a cradle of roots, sometimes dozing on each other. It is essentially the same thing which they do in the Tank- Lalli has relocated to a safe distance from the talisman of his buried childhood and Emil could do nothing but follow, of course.

It is on a slower, quieter afternoon that Sigrun gets the story. Unexpectedly, because she has never once pressed for information. She figured that if Mikkel wanted to recount his experience (undoubtedly in Kastrup) he would have told her by now.  
And he does tell her. Only her. Sigrun is not sure whether she is too old to use the term ‘best friends’ seriously, but she is fairly certain this is what she and Mikkel have made of each other over the last few months. It seems natural, once the story is in progress, that he shares this with her.

He tells her while she sharpens a sword and he cleans a rifle. Lalli’s rifle, because Lalli does not clean it to Mikkel’s satisfaction or with the correct frequency, in his opinion. Whenever Lalli leaves it unguarded, Mikkel sneaks away with an oil cloth and a small smirk on his face, and acts as a kind of cleaning fairy.  
Sigrun is just imagining him in a loincloth made of clover, like one of the pictures in the books she read as a child, when he picks up the subject out of nowhere.

“I lost this leg in a fire.”

Blinking, Sigrun looks up “Huh?”

“I expect you want to know.”

“If you want to tell me.”

“I do, I suppose, otherwise I would have made some inane remark on the weather.”

As one they glance up and squint at the sky.

“Looks like rain.” grumbles Sigrun “Those canoodling fools had better be back before it starts coming down. I’m gonna be very mad if they get pneumonia on top of whatever STDs they’re swapping out there.”

“Sigrun.”

“What? You know it’s what they’re doing!”

“I sincerely doubt it.”

Mikkel is correct. At the moment Emil is making a tiny snowman on top of Lalli’s chest while Lalli sleeps in the snow, unaware of the betrayal taking place.

After a moment of silence that is neither tense nor comfortable, Mikkel continues “At Kastrup, as you have probably guessed.”

“Yeah.” says Sigrun.

She was twenty during the Kastrup disaster. There was a fear that she might be conscripted to the Danish front-line to help with the recovery effort, being as young and strong and enthused as she had proved to be, but her parents must have pulled some strings to duck her out, because she never so much as got a sniff of the fires in Kastrup.  
Kastrup happened in early November. Mikkel is a eighteen months older than her, so he would have been finishing up his twenty-first summer. 

“I heard they burned for five days.” says Sigrun “The fires.”

He nods “Machine oil and human body fat. Potent combination. Excellent fuel. I can still smell it, sometimes. When I wake up to my partner cooking meat in the kitchen, for example, for a moment I think she’s got a slab of human flesh in there.”

Partner, thinks Sigrun, I’m going to quiz him on that later.   
But not now. This is not the time for it.

Laying the barrel of the rifle on the floor, Mikkel takes the sight in the palms of his hands and searches the glass for cracks or chips “You know I’m an elder brother.”

“Yeah. There’s seven others or something.”

“Mm. I’m the second oldest. My twin is older than me by two and a half minutes…at any rate, my first little brother, Inuk, died at Kastrup. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He was a new recruit to the military. Barely broken his boots in. Some jackass mixed up his papers and sent him up with the unit of veterans that were coming in to do damage control on the breach on the south barrier. When the fires started, he was right on the front-line.”

The sound of metal on flint fills the gap in the conversation.

Mikkel covers his face with one hand and wipes away an errant tear “I heard him screaming. Strange, isn’t it? That I could recognise his out of so many others, but you wouldn’t think so if you had met Inuk. He screamed at everything. He had a mortal fear of rats, bats, spiders and goats. Can you believe that, goats?” a soft smile stretches across Mikkel’s mouth “Silly boy. He spent so much of his childhood screaming I would know that scream- that yip of mortal terror, anywhere I heard it.”

“Here.” Sigrun passes him a paper tissue fished from her pocket.

“Thank you,” he wipes it across his eyes “I wasn’t quite too late by the time I found him. He had…he had been over-killed, I suppose, is the term. You know, when a body is mangled beyond all need? That was him. Inuk was still alive and conscious. Conscious of being over-killed as well. We were hip-deep in flames. He would have cried, but I think his body was already too hot by then. I pulled him from the fire and ended up with the most…obscene burns on this leg,” he slaps the prosthetic as one might slap the rump of a recalcitrant ox “And some scar tissue here.”

Briefly, he pulls up the trouser sleeve of his other leg. Sigrun sees white twists of scar tissue that look remarkably like white flowers before the cloth goes back down.

“Did he die?”

“Yes. He had third-degree burns over forty percent of his body and nothing left beneath the hips. It was only the left-over adrenalin that had his heart beating by the time I got to him. He died perhaps three minutes later,” Mikkel lays the sight with the rest of the gun, now polished to a high gloss “The irony of it, I suppose, is that I lost my leg because I would not suffer to be moved. I was convinced he was still breathing. I thought I could feel his heart beat beneath my palms. It was my own pulse, I’m sure. There was a battle on. Many of the wounded were coming out of the burned south line, and the battle had slowed down just enough because of this thick fire blocking the entrance up where we had failed…so the medics were busy. They had to make decisions. I was not a priority, because I was clutching a dead person and threatened to knife anyone who tried to move me. Or take him away. So my leg was infected by the filth around me, went septic and came off. Then I was fitted with a prosthetic in Finland and that was it.”

Sigrun cocks an eyebrow “Finland?”

“Keuruu. I went to a specialist. There was a doctor who would come up from Saimaa every now and then to take some of the burden off the physical therapy units in the city.”

She glances towards the woods “His name wasn’t Hannu, was it?”

“Hannu Hotakainen, as a matter of fact.”

“Shit.”

“That’s what I thought. I’m not going to mention it. I think I have already caused Lalli enough pain by merely using my leg.”

Sigrun lays a hand on his knee- the false knee “You ok?”

Mikkel shrugs “I’m alive.”

“Yeah, me too. But are you ok?”

“I’m not certain. Most days I am somewhere between ok and not. The death of a family member is never far from your mind.”

She nods. Sigrun is so glad she does not know this from personal experience. Only borrowed tragedy.

“Hey Mikkel.”

“Yes?”

Sigrun tugs the collar of her shirt down and points to a wicked slash of scar tissue across her breast-bone “Did I ever tell you how I got this scar?”


	92. 49: Stripes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir discovers the world is a little bit bigger than he thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of magical pseudo-science for everyone on this fine day!

Reynir awakes to a song that is both familiar and alien at once. At the same time, slowly, he becomes aware of the pulse underneath his ear, of a crick in his neck, and on the other side of him, of a soft and warm weight squishing into his shoulder.  
The song is in a language Reynir identifies immediately as English- he hears Sigrun singing to herself in English, swearing to herself, talking to herself whenever she does not care to share her concerns with the rest of the team. But he also knows he has never heard these words before. Nor the strange cadences of an English song like this one. Nor a scrap of English that immediately made sense to him, which this does.

The song says “…you been on my mind girl like a drug. Oh-Ophelia, heaven help a fool who falls in love...”

Without his permission, Reynir’s mouth opens “Who’s Ophelia?”

He is inside a car. Not the kind of car he has seen on the streets in Reykjavik, all armoured and solid and small, like bullets. This one is huge and airy and full of sunlight.

“That chick in Hamlet. Dies in the most feminine way ever.” someone swivels in the front seat. Sigrun, with her shoulders bare in a summer dress, her knees tucked up into her chest.  
She manages the task of looking like a complete badass even in the dress. Reynir imagines the Sigrun he knows wearing it into battle, bellowing her battle-cry, swinging an axe over her head.

“How?” asks Reynir, at once conscious of being completely comfortable and completely unnerved by this change in his surroundings.

“Flowers.” says Lalli, to his left, whose shoulder Reynir is apparently using as a pillow “She goes mad because of unrequited love, then passes out flowers, then drowns.”

“Sounds like a good way to go to me.” says Emil, in the driver’s seat, which strikes Reynir as completely disrespectful to Tuuri.  
Tuuri is the weight on his other side. She spills out of the smallest pair of shorts Reynir has ever seen and a top that kind of melds into the shorts. What’s the word? Overalls? He thinks that’s it.

Tuuri scoffs and lays a book in her lap to argue- something in Norwegian, going by the language on the front, though Reynir is pretty sure he has never seen it written and should therefore not be able to recognise it “You kidding me? I want to die in an explosion. Like, an explosion of fire and lava. Caused by an evil villain mastermind. When I go out, I want the world to know I went out.”

“The world knew Ophelia died,” retorts Emil “Her death is one of the most famously romantic and poetic in the Western canon.”

“I like explosions.” adds Sigrun “And fire.”

“I like flowers.” says Reynir.

“Maybe you should die in a fiery explosion while holding a bouquet of roses?” suggests Tuuri.

“How about an explosion of roses? Roses have thorns. You get enough of those flying at a big enough velocity and you’d look like hairy Swiss cheese.”

“Sig, if it’s an explosion then the roses are just going to be torn to pieces.”  
Reynir straightens as best he can without dislodging Tuuri, and cracks his neck. He looks Lalli up and down as subtly as he can.

“What?” says Lalli.

“Nothing.” Reynir squints at him “I mean, I think nothing. Maybe nothing. I hope nothing.”

“How much longer ‘til we get there?” asks Tuuri “I gotta pee.”

“Ten minutes,” Emil checks his watch “Provided we don’t have to chase a cow out of the road again.”

Though Reynir has absolutely no idea what is going on, he cannot summon up the energy to be frightened by this. He peers over Lalli’s head at the flat, green expanse that whips by and wonders vaguely where the barbed wire fences and scorch-marks from Cleansing efforts might be on this unscathed landscape.  
Surely no nation escaped the Rash? Certainly no nation escaped the Rash and held onto its technology like this. All of the money would have gone into military defence, not kitting out Sven and Svetlana public with comfortable private cars, with enough room to fit a friend in shotgun and three more in the back, if they don’t mind cuddling.

Reynir examines his hands and is relived to find they are still calloused and scarred. It is one thing to find himself in an alien reality and still be surrounded by his friends, but it would be an entirely different thing if his body was not his own. After his years in the fields, battling rams and catching lambs and fishing lost ewes out of snow-wells and caves, he would feel cheated if he turned up in another world with the clean hands of someone who has never done a day’s hard work.  
His braid is still in place. Reynir confirms with a surreptitious glance down his shirt that his biological gender hasn’t tried to reassert itself wherever he is, and is relieved to find his pecs flat and smooth, the way a man’s typically are.

“Yay. No boobs.” he thinks, except he says this aloud, and grins sheepishly when Lalli gives him a strange look.

Then something occurs to him.

“Where’s Mikkel?”

“We’re going to see him, you dunce,” Sigrun looks over her freckled shoulder at him in concern “Did you hit your head?”

“What? Um, no, not any harder than usual, I mean.”

“Give me your forehead. I want to see if you have a fever.”

Fifteen minutes later, they pull into the long drive of a huge white house splashed with ivy and purple flowers that also climb in creepers. Behind it is a sprawl of well-tended fields, a red barn, and a silo that is either for grain or aesthetic. Dogs run freely around the front of the house and circle the car as Emil parks carefully.

“I cannot fucking believe it,” Emil gets out without turning off the engine to survey the damage “Stupid cow!”

Sigrun has yet to stop laughing. She leans over and flicks the ignition off, then hops out of the car. The dogs put their paws on her knees and stomach and yip for joy.  
“I have literally never seen such a goddamned mad cow before. You’d think Emil had eaten its mother or something!”

“Well maybe I did…sweet baby Jesus, how am I going to explain this scratch to Uncle Torbjörn?”

Lalli gets out and causes a domino effect; without his shoulder to prop Reynir upright, Reynir falls sideways, and Tuuri comes with him.  
“Just tell him the truth,” advises Lalli.

“He won’t believe a cow attacked the car! He’ll think I’m just covering for a major door-ding or something.”

“Em, if I was your uncle, I would believe you were attacked by a cow.”

Emil squints suspiciously at Lalli “Why?”

The other boy shrugs “Seems like something that’d happen to you.”

“Are you…are you saying I’m like a matador or something?”

“More like a damsel in distress.”

“Thanks Lalli. That really makes me feel better about being hassled by a cow.”

It takes some time for Reynir and Tuuri to right themselves, then Tuuri gets stuck in her seat-belt and has to be wrestled free. By the time Tuuri is finally crowing with triumph outside the car, Mikkel has appeared in the doorway of the house.  
He looks like himself- down to the apron, except this one is dusted with flour rather than soap suds or Sigrun’s blood.

“You’re late.” announces Mikkel, not unkindly.

“Hello you housewife,” beams Sigrun, rubbing a dog’s belly with two hands “We were unavoidably detained.”

“By a cow.” adds Tuuri.

“Two cows.” corrects Lalli.

“Look at what the second one did to the car! I hope the damn thing gets captured by McDonalds!”

Reynir does not bother to ask what a McDonalds is. He has suddenly begun to feel very light-headed. The back of his throat is bathed in the taste of copper, like blood, and he has to back up to the car and sit down heavily before his legs give out underneath him.

 

“- dead in his own haven, then this is the first time I’ve ever seen something like this.”

The sight of Onni and Lalli hanging over him is such a sudden and violent change that Reynir cannot help but scream.

“SHIT!”

In turn, both of the Hotakainen men spring back with yelps of their own. Onni curses at him and Lalli dives into a nearby clump of roving sheep for cover.

Reynir clutches at his chest “Holy gods, I’m sorry- I just- I was somewhere else! Sigrun was there and Lalli was there and we were speaking the same language and some English guy was singing about Ophelia-”

Lalli pops out of the sheep like he’s on a spring “What’s this fresh insanity?”

Reynir points at him, then back at himself “We were in a car! And the car fought a cow and the cow won!”

The Hotakainens exchange a glance.

“He isn’t dead,” surmises Lalli “But it sounds like his brain is.”

“No, no, I’m not crazy! Sigrun was in a summer dress and she had freckles on her shoulder and then Mikkel was baking bread, or something, and I was still a boy, maybe even with a boy’s body from birth, and Emil was driving the car…” he pauses to take in their concerned expressions “Am I making any sense?”

“No.” says Lalli.

“Less than usual.” says Onni.

“Is it possible to fall into other worlds? Like, you know how there are nine worlds, right? I think I went out of Midgard for a moment, our Midgard, and into another one-”

Onni’s face brightens- well, he exchanges a deep frown for a light grimace “Oh, now I see. Why didn’t you say what had happened to you instead of harping on about Sigrun’s shoulders and this Ophelia woman…who the Lempo is she, anyway?”

“Some lady that drowned in flowers, I think?”

“Reynir, do you remember what happened to you?”

“In the other Midgard?”

“No, here, in your haven.”

“Um, no? I just went to sleep and I woke up not in my haven.”

Onni glances at Lalli with something that might be pride “Well, in an uncharacteristic stroke of humanity, my cousin noticed you hadn’t come around to pester him and visited your haven to make sure you hadn’t expired during the day. When he found you, you were stretched out on your face-”

“Drooling.” supplies Lalli.

“- so he came and got me and we spent a few moments trying to revive you when you screamed in our faces. Lalli, for Ukko’s sake, you’re safe. Get out of the sheep’s way.”

Onni makes the two of them sit in front of him, in a way that reminds Reynir faintly of school. Though he is not overtly hostile, Lalli is reluctant to get too close to Reynir, as if Reynir might suddenly slump on top of him and start drooling again.

“Alright, Lalli, I can’t remember if I ever told you about this, but I’ll tell you now.”

Biting the fingertip of a glove, Onni frees his hand with his teeth and draws a long line in the bare dirt with his forefinger.  
“This is Midgard. Our world. Ukko’s realm. Whatever you want to call it.”

Next, he draws a shorter line at the base and top of the first “This is Ukko’s kingdom at the top, and this is Tuonela at the bottom.” And then he draws a circle around the entire thing, and another, and another, until he has made eight nine circles in total “And these are the worlds. I’ve drawn Midgard in the middle for clarity’s sake. Our pantheons and gods coexist.”

“Wait a minute,” says Reynir “I get Tuonela and Ukko’s kingdom and all, but Midgard sits on the World Tree. Why have you drawn the worlds as circles?”

“Well I can’t sketch out the whole frigging tree, can I? And this isn’t an accurate map, Reynir. If I wanted to give you an accurate map then I’d have to sketch out this place,” he gestures around the haven and to the wider dreamscape, presumably “Then I’d have to draw each gate to each gods’ realm individually. And that would just be confusing. So for argument’s sake, this is Midgard and it’s sandwiched between Tuonela and Ukko’s kingdom, and then encircled by the other eight worlds. Understand?”

Lalli nods. Reynir is completely lost, but he nods too.

“If this is us, then this is where you were just now.” Onni draws another identical line a few centimetres away from the outermost circle “Another Midgard.”

“What.” says Lalli.

“I said another Midgard. There is more than one. There is more than one reality shaped like ours. There are millions, in fact, hundreds of millions. Every little thing that happens to us happens differently to someone else. I’m assuming, if Reynir was in some kind of private car, then he just visited a world where the Rash never touched the world, or was at least managed before it overwhelmed the world.”

“I don’t get it.” says Reynir.

“You think I do? It’s a mind-boggling concept. Too grand for our minds to grasp, I think, in scope and implication. It would mean there are multiple gods governing multiple worlds where everything is the same except for one key thing which changed the world enough to make it a new one. And this goes on and on and on into eternity, and the worlds and their gods are all stacked up on top of each other, like stripes on the skin of the universe. I don’t understand it, but I have explained as best I can….and I see from your gaping mouths that neither of you have any idea what I mean.”

“If it happens all the time, how come you never said?” asks Lalli after he has gathered his wits.

“You have enough to worry about without the fear that you might trip into a spare reality at any moment. Which you won’t.” Onni swipes his forefinger clean on the dewy grass “It rarely happens. When it does, it is nothing at all to worry about. Think of it as a sneeze. Something you cannot help nor control, but it is ultimately harmless. Just a little annoying. Over in a flash. Understand?”

“I guess so,” Reynir rocks back on his haunches and considers the dark dome of the starry sky overhead “Huh. This world is a whole lot bigger than we give it credit for, isn’t it?”

“A hundred Silent Worlds.” mutters Lalli.

“More than that. I wonder how many Silent Worlds there are with us together?” Reynir smiles at him “Thanks for coming to check on me, by the way.”

Lalli grunts.

“Speaking of which, boys, I’m going to head back to my haven. I’m due to wake up some time soon.”

Onni departs with a ruffle of Lalli’s hair and an awkward handshake for Reynir. As he reaches the edge of Reynir’s haven, the back of his coat trembles and rents itself into a pair of long snowy wings. Onni is whisked out of sight in an instant. He sails off into the black as a spot of white and is gone before Reynir can finish his gasp.

“A lot bigger than we give it credit for,” breathes Reynir.

He looks to Lalli for confirmation, but the other mage has laid down in the grass and gone to sleep.


	93. 10: Breathe again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emil has a close encounter with some unusually aggressive spirits. Lalli has his back, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Santa Claus is coming to town.

It is said that a non-mage who has a near-death experience at the hands of a näkki or another spirit of some kind will be granted the ability to see the spirit world as clearly as a mage for their troubles. Said by Tuuri, specifically, relating an old wives’ tale to Emil one slow afternoon.

She held Reynir’s ball of yarn for him while he knitted furiously at her feet (a sweater with a pattern of runos that Reynir said would prevent stab-wounds, which Sigrun was quick to test and was delighted by the results- Mikkel was far less excited about the way she chose to go about her trial and chased her with an English-Swedish dictionary for at least half a mile before his rage abated), and sounded like an old wife herself. Something about the lazy, wise manner in which she held herself. Like an old woman sagging in on herself, jaded to the world, living through the myths of magic that never personally visited her life.

“I mean, I actually grew up hoping that something would try to kill me. Can you believe that? I wanted so badly to see what the boys can see that I wished a peikko would kidnap me for those children Fight Clubs they run. I wanted a pure hiisi to lope out of their cave and smash me in the head with a rock, so I could fight them off and…I don’t know. Ride a friendly selky home to toot my triumph to the whole village. ‘Look at Tuuri! She isn’t a dud in the magical heritage of the Hotakainens! Now we can stop saying she’ll never be married off because of it!’ and all that.”

“Married off?” was mainly what he took away from it.

“Oh yeah, for some reason the folks in our town were real traditionalist about marriage. Didn’t matter if you were gay, straight, bi, whatever. I mean, god-forbid that you were aro-”

At this point Sigrun strode out of the Tank and posed like a conquering hero, hands on her hips “You called?”

“I did not!” Tuuri flapped a hand “Begone, wench, I’m bitching about marriage to Emil.”

And most of whatever else she told him is lost in that conversation about marriage, and the barrage of aromantic jokes Sigrun would not stop making. That was also the afternoon Sigrun put Reynir’s knit-manship to the test. So the intricacies of the near-death portal into the spirit world was kind of lost on Emil.  
All he knows when he encounters the situation himself is that he does not want to die, but unfortunately for him, it is very likely he will.

 

At one point the sight of a naked woman languishing at the edge of a flower-fringed pond would have stirred something in him. Not arousal.   
Even back in the days when Emil convinced himself he was straight, for posterity’s sake, the sight of a woman’s exposed body never did a thing for him. Hel- Sigrun hasn’t worn a shirt for most of the last month when inside the Tank, and overall it’s no big deal if Sigrun and Tuuri want to strip down to their bras as the men strip to their bare chests when the heater does its job too well and has them all sweating. 

What it would have stirred was fear. Fear for the woman, specifically. Is she alright? Would she like to borrow his cloak, if she is uncomfortable with her nakedness? Has someone hurt her? Is she lost?  
And secondly, fear for himself. What if this woman is not human? What if this woman is the embodiment of one of those myths his grandparents used to scare him close to the hearth on the dark winter nights?

A healthy fear would have awoken in him. But this is what slightly spongey, inexperienced Emil would have thought.  
The Emil who discovers the Tuuri-shaped woman beckoning him from the edge of the pond is kind of resigned to weirdness of this sort. He knows näkki can appear to non-mages when they want to. He knows magic is real, because Lalli’s invisible lynx will crawl under his arm every now and then and purr so thunderously it makes his teeth click together. Reynir has sneezed fire before. The undeniable existence of magic has become one of those facts he simply accepts about life; rain is wet, everyone breathes air and magic is real. 

So what is this before him? An unusually beautiful woman in one of those pockets of eternal summer that the Rash tricks nature into leaving?  
Wonderful. Now should he burn her or is she friendly?

Emil keeps his distance.

“Are you hurt?” he calls, pulling his flamethrower from his back. Just in case.

The woman purses a pair of heart-shaped lips and shakes her head in the coyest way.

“May I help you in any way?”

The woman nods shyly. She bites her lower lip (with fangs. Those are definitely fangs) and peers up at him through lashes thick enough to serve as windshield wipers.

Emil wants to laugh “Any way that does not require the use of genitals, I mean.”

“Don’t like women?” coos the woman “I can help that.” she sounds like a bad imitation of a woman flirting, as if she has been missing her practice for a handful of decades. Not quite human. Her words are too fluid. Her voice is too liquid. She babbles at the back of her throat like a thin brook.

“I doubt you can. Listen, if you’re after some healthy human prey…well, I’m not that healthy. I’m fairly certain I’ve been eating candle wax for the last five months and I breathe a lot of smoke.”

“You think I’m going to eat you?”

“Well that is what näkki tend to want to do when they try to tempt prey like this.”  
His throat has gone dry. Lalli’s been acting as his shadow almost since the day they met. Why would he have to pick today of all days to peel himself from Emil’s back? Why can’t he just cling all of the time?

“What did you call me? A näkki?” her eyes are bright with amusement “Are you a Finn?”

He does not answer. Why does she speak to him like this? Why is she acknowledging what she should dance around, if she wants to make a meal of him?

“I’m a huldra. Silly child. No one calls themselves a näkki in these parts.”  
Then her eyes stray over his shoulder and Emil realises why they are talking like this.

But before he can turn and raise his weapon, a hand is around his throat. The flamethrower is wrenched from his shoulder. He tries to cry out when the strap snaps painfully on his collarbone, but his throat has already begun to close.

In mid-air, he is turned to face the other monster. The one that crept up behind him while the huldra held his attention.

“But he calls himself Joulupukki. From your country. Perhaps you know him?”

This one is immense. A grotesque face fringed with black fur like nettles. So tall his horned head scrapes the topmost branches of the tallest trees. He holds Emil at about his chest-height and regards him with coal-coloured eyes, like a child inspecting an insect they have just found crawling across their pillow.   
The thing’s rippling black body is swathed in great red rags, so bright that they hurt to look at.

“This one,” rumbles Joulupukki “This one is not a countryman of mine. This is a Swede. I can smell Asgard in him. How came you here, boy?”

For obvious reasons, Emil cannot respond. Having the entirety of his body weight supported by a vice-grip about his neck is just about the most painful thing he has ever experienced. With a burst of panicked strength, he folds his legs at the knees and kicks out, not intending to stun his attacker, but to snag is legs in the snarls of fabric. He succeeds. Now the weight is gone from his throat, and it is like he stands upon the monster’s chest.   
Wrapping his fingers around the massive hand clamped about his throat, Emil begins to pry. Of course he cannot hope to break the thing’s grip. But at least Joulupukki might realise it will get no response from him without lessening its grip.

It does not. It barely seems aware of where it is, or who it holds. Those black, black eyes are glazed and distant “I was a kind spirit, once. I would have greeted you from the backs of reindeer…the likes of which you have never seen. The strongest of the herds of my Saimaa friends…my friends are all dead now…the whole place is dead. I know. I’ve looked. I’ve looked and looked, but everywhere I look, there are just more dead. I thought, perhaps, when the gods came back, when Ukko made himself known and loved again that I might too rise from the ashes of obscurity…condemned to rot by that blasted soft drink mascot…but I rose to a dead world. I am the spirit of charity in a world of the dead.”

“Here he goes.” sighs the huldra, then, louder: “Joulupukki, dear, I haven’t had man flesh in decades! Be a dear and bring me the child while he’s still alive. I prefer it when they kick. Fresh blood does wonderful things for the skin, you know. Maybe we’ll make you a facial wash from his blood. See if we can’t get some of that furry despair off your face, so you’ll look like yourself again.”

Emil is fairly certain he is about to die. At least it will not be by strangulation, though his head is light and his tongue is beginning to feel thick- he’ll be dropped in the water for the huldra to chew on at her leisure.   
Already, Joulupukki shambles towards the pond. He’ll drop Emil in without a second thought and continue rambling about the old days under his breath.

“I wore green, once…it’s gone red with blood. Dried blood. I can’t get it to come out.”

Finally, he forces the words to come “Is this…how you greet the first of…of us…”

Joulupukki’s eyes brighten with surprise. The glaze falls from them. For the first time, his eyes swivel down to Emil and take in the sight of him “What?”

The grip slackens. Emil’s knees nearly buckle as the full of weight of his body is given back to him, but he manages to stay upright. He grips the hand tighter and hooks an elbow over the wrist, in the same way he might rest on the edge of a swimming pool.  
Emil has to wheeze “A spirit of charity, right? Charity to humans…and I’m the first human in you see for so many years and you decide you’re going to kill me straight away?”

He sees he has made a mistake pretty quickly. Whoever Joulupukki might be when he is distant and sad, he is not this person when he is grounded in his reality.  
His eyes are like flint “It is a charitable service to end your life, child. You are young. You have seen nothing of the world. You know nothing of its cruelty. And besides, my friend is hungry.”

“That I am! Hurry up and drop him to me!” cries the huldra.  
All vestiges of gentleness and coquettishness have dropped from her voice. Emil has no doubt that if he turned he would be looking at something withered and starved and not at all beautiful.

“I know this world is cruel. I’m here, aren’t I? And I’m not a child.” Emil’s stare strays briefly over Joulupukki’s massive shoulder, and when he looks back, there is something like fire in them “I’m a fully grown man, thank you.”

 

Lalli strikes without mercy.

The huldra does not seem him coming. Joulupukki has no idea he is about to be struck until Lalli’s knife has struck his left back-leg at its reversed joint.  
Goat-legs are never very strong or sound to begin with. The years of agony and spiritual degradation have left Joulupukki looking strong and powerful as ever, but on the inside, he is nothing more than dry tendons and chalky bones. A strong punch to the back of his knee would probably break it. 

But Lalli uses a knife and all of his considerable strength, so the effect is much more dramatic. 

Joulupukki’s kneecap explodes from its wrapping of black furred flesh in a blossom of clotted oily blood. The severed leg sags off to the side with a creak of relief and crumbles into something like the rot-wet leaves found at the bottom of a winter thaw; frozen left-overs from the last days of autumn.   
Emil is dropped. To his credit he does not lay there, stunned, but rolls away across the snow the moment he is aware of being on the ground.

With a snarl of rage, the huldra launches herself from her pond in an explosion of foam. She lands heavily on the snow, dragging an immense, twisted tail behind her, and claws her way rapidly across the ground towards Emil.

Lalli cannot help him: he’s preoccupied with the huge, angry god looming over him.

Lalli blinks “Joulupukki.”

The god’s eyes smoulder with rage “You are a Finn. Attacked by one of my own kin. How dare you raise a hand against the gods that loved your ancestors?”

“Fuck off.” replies Lalli.

He lunges before Joulupukki is prepared to defend himself. This time, he borrows his luonto’s strength and jumps. He wraps a fist in the ragged red robes (the red starts to come away in huge flakes) and plunges his dagger into Joulupukki’s breastbone. Blood bursts out of the wound like it cannot wait to be free from the body. Lalli ducks, but still gets a large drop of the gunk on his chin. Smells like cinnamon and hot chocolate.

The god roars in agony.

Approximately half a kilometre away, the ground shakes and a few books fall from their towers in the study.

Sigrun leaps to her feet “What the Hel was that?”

Mikkel places his basket of laundry on the ground “Is Emil back yet?”

Tuuri pops her head out of the Tank, already masked and raring to go “That’s Lalli. I know it. I know he did something stupid.”

“Tuuri! Wait a second, you can’t just go running off by yourself!”

Tuuri grabs Sigrun by the uninjured arm and Reynir by his collar “Then come with me! Mikkel, watch the Tank and the cat!”

 

While Lalli is preoccupied with the task of killing a god, Emil has a huldra’s claws scrabbling at his thighs in a way that reminds him eerily of his first boyfriend. That guy was clumsy. So clumsy, in fact, it was just embarrassing to be intimate with him.

This makes it a little easier for Emil to rip his knife from his belt and plunge it into the huldra’s screaming face.

“Stupid Gunther!” he shouts, without knowing it.

The huldra’s scream turns to a kind of ululating gurgle “Starved!” over and over again “Starved starved starved starved-”

Wrenching a leg from her grasp, Emil kicks a shoulder so hard he hears the joint dislocate.

Though Emil can barely breathe, he keeps screaming “I did not sign up for this shit! I didn’t sign up to be attacked by spirits! I didn’t sign up to be sat on by a giant lynx! I didn’t sign up for magical Viking boot-camp or candle-wax sludge for dinner every night! Mikkel says – no I promise this isn’t wax, but we know! WE KNOW!”

Lalli has only half an idea of what Emil is saying with his limited Swedish vocabulary, but he is pretty certain his friend has lost it.

So is Sigrun, when she arrives. Distance stands no chance against a long-legged Norwegian captain with good cause to think her subordinates are imperilled, especially when it’s just flat ground.

The scene she stumbles into is of a great horned thing in red robes, bugling, smashing into trees and pounding at its chest in vain attempts to squash the silver fury that whips around it, tearing more and more holes in it each time. Then there is Emil. Because the huldra did not think to reveal herself to all humans present, Sigrun can only see the vague and twisted outline of something covered in foam and blood, and the place where its claws are sunk into Emil, about mid-thigh.

There is a lot of noise pollution as well.

If she understands Finnish, she would know Lalli’s saying “Will you please just die already!”

And that the thing called Joulupukki howls “TRAITOR TO YOUR GODS! TRAITOR TO YOUR GODS!”

She understands what Emil is saying- screaming: “…miss my dogs miss my cousins miss my room miss my bed-“

And the invisible malignant thing on his thigh screeches “STARVED STARVED STARVED STARVED STARVED STARVED-”

In a few strides, Sigrun stands over Emil. She grabs at the foamy thing under her and heaves it away with all of her might. Unfortunately, the thing has a pretty good grip on Emil’s thigh and is determined to bring a piece of it away with it.

Emil cries out.

“Sorry!” Sigrun flings the thing towards the pond with all of her strength. She hears a splash and decides she is safe for now, and scoops Emil up.

“We can’t leave Lalli-” he breaks off into a coughing fit.

“He’s fine. I don’t know what he’s doing, but he doesn’t need our help.”

Sigrun retreats into the woods behind the pond and lowers Emil to the ground carefully. She unzips his jacket and lets out a low whistle at what she sees around his neck.

“I’m going to die?” shouting after nearly being choked out is not a good idea. Emil can only whisper now.

“No. You’ll be just fine. It’s just…this is gonna bruise pretty badly, that’s all.”

They both look up as the death-cry of a splintered tree sounds. Joulupukki’s lacerated body crashes back into it. At last, he is dead, or at least too injured to make much of a fuss.

Lalli leaps from the crumbling body at the last minute and rolls- far too closed to the pond.

“Lalli!” 

His shocked eyes find her.

Sigrun jabs her finger at the pond “Näkki!”

The warning comes too late. This time Sigrun can see the slimy thing that grabs the scout and wrenches him to the water. Lalli’s other battle has left him tired and weakened- he has no time or strength to protest before the thing is on top of him, cranking open an eel’s jaw to bite into his chest.

Sigrun can’t get to him in time. She stands and runs, knowing this, and knowing she will never forgive herself for what is about to happen.

Then out of literally nowhere comes Tuuri. Tuuri, red-faced in anger and exertion, her mask fogged, her eyes aflame with rage. With one hand she seizes the monster, a huldra, it must be a huldra, and raises it above her head with two.

Sigrun screeches to a halt. The scene is just too terrifying to bring herself to enter.

Tuuri makes a noise unlike anything ever issued from her mouth before. It is a noise which is both vicious and bovine. A noise of pure animal rage in a voice accustomed only to smiles and giggles.

The huldra screams. Tuuri screams louder and starts to bend the huldra in two with all of her strength. The snap comes seconds later. A large section of spine pops out of the huldra’s back. Blue blood sprinkles Tuuri so it looks as if an ink pen exploded on her face.  
With a grunt, Tuuri tosses her halved enemy into the pond. The moment the body has splashed out of sight, she is cooing, kneeling beside Lalli, fussing over him in sweet Finnish.

Sigrun stares. Reynir appears at her side. His mask is fogged from running. His eyes are wider than Sigrun knew human eyes could go.

He puts a shaking hand on Sigrun’s shoulder to steady himself and looks at her in a way which says: did we just see that?

Sigrun nods “She’s crazy, obviously. In a good way.”

Then a strained cough from behind them reminds her Emil is still in need of assistance, and she turns her back on the Hotakainens to attend to them.

 

“…so the short of it is Lalli basically had to kill Santa Claus because Santa Claus was going to kill Emil.” Mikkel leans back in his chair and tents his finger in the way he does when he has to keep from hitting something “That is what I am to believe?”

Tuuri nods “The figure that inspired Santa Claus. That big red guy the old world loved so much was just a mascot for some soft drink company.”

“And you tell me this in spite of knowing my beliefs.”

“Look, Mikkel, I don’t care what you believe right now!” Sigrun snaps “What matters is that Emil and Lalli were nearly killed. I need to know what you can do for them.”

Mikkel sighs through his nose “I don’t need to do a thing for Lalli, except perhaps administer a sedative. He is understandably upset. And as for Emil, he’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t wound his neck any further. He’ll have some trouble breathing for a little while. I hope you and Lalli like each other. He’ll have to be your right-hand Viking for at least the remainder of the week.”

“Mikkel!” comes a strained cry from the backroom of the Tank “That thing with five eyes is in the window again!”

“Just don’t look at it!” then, in an undertone, he says “And I believe he might be hallucinating. An understandable symptom of shock, for one who has so narrowly escaped death by Santa Claus.”

Tuuri groans “Oh no! No, I know what this is- a near death experience because of a spirit. It’s opened the spirit world for him. Crap. Poor Emil. He’ll be so confused. I better go talk to him.”

Excusing herself, Tuuri pads from the room. The back of her jacket is still sprinkled with blue.

“Mikkel.” says Sigrun very seriously.

“Yes, Sigrun.”

“I think we’ve seriously under-estimated this crew. They are a lot stronger than we give them credit for…even Reynir, I think.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

“Well what should we do about that?”

“Maybe we take Freckles’ warnings a little more seriously now. Maybe we listen a little more carefully to Lalli. I don’t know,” she sighs and lowers her head to the desk “I’ve seen some shit today, Mikkel.”

“Would you like a hug?”

“Yes please.”

And so, the two most senior members of this team of veterans-in-the-making hug it out. If either of them hears the plaintive cry of pain from the woods, they do not react.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end-of-finals-stress crashed headlong into a desire to infuse more of the Scandinavian mythical culture into these works. I apologise for what you just sat through.


	94. 44: Hate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ensi Hotakainen never intended to be a grandmother of three. Nor was Lalli willing to succumb.
> 
> (Flash-back with some heavy Emilalli at the end. Watch out for themes of infant abandonment a la Romans)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jumping on the Ensi bandwagon! Man, does she have an entrancing character design. I'm still not finished staring at her. She's just plain awesome looking. I'm not sure what I think her character might actually be at this point, so I went for a semi-Roman, hard-ass survivalist kind of thing. I hope to write more of her character in the future.

By the standards of the Silent World, Lalli was a late arrival. It was expected that a person who had a child around thirty would be handed their first grandchild around fifty. Lalli was the third and last grandchild, handed to his grandmother when she was at the unthinkable age of seventy-one. People of such ages were considered antiques; triumphs, as the legacy of the world that would have been dying at their feet just as they learned to walk.

This alone would have been enough to make Ensi Hotakainen the pride of Mikkeli, had she not forged her own impressive legacy by the time she reached twenty. Children of parents directly from the Old World were known to carry their parents’ rage and grief in spades. They were often conceived or born into hell and most of them did not survive, so those that did were either favourites of the gods or had fought hard for their right to survive to adulthood.  
For this, Ensi was known. Her temper was more like a constant state of being. Not so much to those around her, but the world around her, as she carried the bitter knowledge of the lives they all might have led had the Rash not brought the world shivering down.

She expected much of herself and more of her peers, and even more of her family.

When she was first handed the small and thin child who was her third grandchild, Ensi was hesitant to hold him.  
“I may break him,” she said, in all seriousness, recalling the child that had been born before Onni and survived less than fifteen minutes “And I wouldn’t count on getting too attached to him. He’s made of paper and twigs as far as I can see.”

She said all this as the new mother, Paju, lay sweaty and pale in her bed. She was also disappointed with the final product of hours and hours of painful labour. After all of that build-up and the excruciating wait, this is what the gods hand her? An infant scarecrow wrapped in rags of near-translucent flesh?

“I wonder if it is even worth the effort to swaddle him.” mused Ensi aloud.

And the moment it was in the air, the idea did not leave. The idea germinated and grew roots in the space between Paju and Ensi, and before the hour was up, the child was gone from the house. His mother had never touched him. She feared to, for touching him would make her failure real. The father was not consulted.  
Ensi wrapped the child in a spare shirt and carried him under her cloak. She greeted those she met in the streets as calmly and casually as if there was no bundle of stirring, warming life next to the handle of her rifle that she was about to surrender to the woods. To the spirits, to do with as they please.

The day was a fresh, still in the dewy stages of a new spring.   
“It’s a shame you were born so weak. A spring child is a good omen.” she told the infant.

She noticed he had cracked open one eye. A grey eye.  
Ensi pulled a thin layer of shirt over the child’s eyes. She found a bed of soft grass where deer were likely to tread in hopes that a clumsy buck might crush his skull, so as to spare him a death by exposure. 

“I would have called you Lalli.” was her parting.

It was only when she turned her back that the child cried out. But Ensi walked on. She knew better than to raise her hopes for nothing.

Two years passed. Onni and Tuuri were told their cousin had gone away to live with the people in the forest. He was a spirit now. He slept in treetops during the day and played by the lake’s edge during the night. When she was four years old, Tuuri was caught in the middle of sneaking out of her house to check the lakeshore for her cousin.   
Sometimes Ensi rose from her bed and went unarmed to the forest to search for the body. It bothered her very much that there was not so much as scrap of bone left to tell her how the child might have passed on. She never found a clue, though, in spite of searching that grew more feverous as the seasons passed. 

The father, Hannu, swallowed the story of stillbirth that he was handed. He grieved for the lost child whole-heartedly. Paju, heartened by the idea that her womb was not yet too old to be used, suggested gently that they try to conceive once more. But no new grandchild came. Most in the village blamed the father’s grief; no man can plant his seeds effectively when his heart is not in the task, the old wives and husbands about the fire would cluck, and say short prayers for the wellbeing of poor Hannu Hotakainen’s broken heart. 

It was two springs after the wan child was given to the woods that he came back. He came back in the night, as most ghosts do.

Not on his own legs. Not of his own accord. He was cradled in one corded arm of a woman dressed in spring colours and bark, armed with a spear as long and supple as a healthy sapling. In her other hand was Onni’s. Ensi never quite figured out how her grandson had managed to get himself involved in his cousin’s return  
As far she could guess he had been searching for a sign of the mythical cousin in the woods (with whom Onni had grown increasingly obsessed since the last winter) and had finally managed to stumble across him. In the arms of a goddess, of course. 

The woman chose to reappear at perhaps the most inopportune moment of the entire night. For Ensi and Paju, that is.  
They and Hannu were seated around the kitchen table. Paju and Ensi pondered the lack of any new Hotakainens, in spite of what Paju assured her were earnest efforts. Hannu stirred his tea with a spoon and said nothing. He preferred instead to watch the fragments of tea leaves swirl about on the surface to participating in the conversation. At the back of his mind he was toying with the idea of leaving his wife. Constructing a fantasy divorce had become a habit of his of late.

Hannu was just thinking he would never manage it, his mother was far too fond of her daughter-in-law, when the door opened in a flower-scented breeze and the woman strode in. 

All three of the Hotakainens stood up. Ensi knocked her chair back. Paju’s face drained entirely of its natural rosy colour and she nearly fell into a faint, keeping herself conscious only with a sharp bite to the inside of her cheek. Hannu looked at the child the goddess held and knew immediately who he was looking at.

“Pardon my intrusion,” said the goddess “I expect you know who I am.”

“Mielikki.” said Ensi hoarsely.

“She lives in the woods.” supplied Onni. He seemed totally nonplussed to be holding a goddess’s hand.

“And you know who this is.” the woman nodded to the child resting in the crook of her elbow. 

Up to that point, he had planted his face in her shoulder. Hiding in her long red hair. But he was compelled by a few whispered words from his transport and an encouraging tug on a dangling foot from his cousin, and had no choice but to turn and stare at the three Hotakainens.

Ensi had been right about the eyes; grey as a thunderhead.

Hannu let out a shuddering breath and with it, all of his incredulity and fear. He stepped forwards and addressed his son.

“Do you know who I am?”

The child scrunched his brow together in an expression eerily similar to the one Hannu himself made when he was uncertain of something.

“My Isukki.” said the child, at last, more in guess than in confidence. He then extended a small hand and touched the side of Hannu’s face, then whipped his hand back as if he was burned. Tentatively, he did this a few more times until he was certain his hand would not pass through Hannu’s face. 

“I’m Lalli.” said Lalli.

“I know.” 

It seemed natural at that moment that the burden exchange arms. Hannu embraced his son and knelt, afraid he might drop him from inexperience, and from the uncontrollable silent sobs that suddenly gripped him. Lalli patted his father on the back and sniffed him surreptitiously, unused to the smell of humans this close up.  
Onni soon wriggled into the embrace. He tried fruitlessly to stem his uncle’s tears. He took absolutely no notice of the women still about the table. Onni would not allow himself to take notice of his grandmother until his fourteenth summer, almost six years from that day, and even then when he spoke to her he could only be terse and cold.

Mielikki stepped in front of the three of them. Her cloak of spring colours hid them from view, though Paju craned to look. She could not bring herself to believe that what Hannu held was the same thing which had come from her two years ago.

“I would appreciate it immensely,” says Mielikki in the clipped tones of an irritated home-owner “If you would not dump your unwanted children in my woods. Ideally, you would take your unwanted children to a home or a person where they might find some love more readily available for them.”

“He was so thin.” protested Paju “He was going to die.”

“He certainly was not. I’m surprised those howls didn’t summon the whole of Mikkeli to my woods.” the goddess’s eyes began to smoulder “I thought I was listening to a dying animal at first. You know what kind of a human infant makes that sort of noise? One that knows it has been abandoned. I approached him with my spear thinking I was going to have a mercy-killing on my hands. Instead I found a human child, whom I took in as my own charge for two springs.”

“You have our undying gratitude-” began Ensi.

Mielikki scoffed “You may keep your gratitude, Ensi Hotakainen, and your grandson at that. No matter how he may have looked at birth I can tell you now that that child has the potential to become a hero of legend. He has learned much from his two years with me. I would assume he is going to be a scout when he is older- the woods will always call to him. He was suckled by a bear and a lynx in turn, so do not be surprised if he shows unusual strength and agility later. He was taught to hunt and walk at the same time. Your household will not go hungry, as long as there is anything remotely edible in the area.”

“Why did you do this?” whimpers Paju. She is somewhere between offended and horrified. Why did her failure have to come back to her? Why in this way? “Why didn’t you leave him?”

A goddess’s anger is something to behold. Ensi had the sense to turn her face from the poisonous eyes, but Paju would develop cataracts in each eye by the end of the winter.

“I might ask you the same. Your body is your own, you understand. What you do with what is inside you while it is inside you is entirely your choice, as it should be…but once that life is outside you, it is no longer your bodily possession. It is its own. He belongs to no one but himself, and human life being as rare as it is now, the folly of…throwing away one of them struck me as particularly ill-conceived. I understand you didn’t think to consult the father either, before making your choice.”

Hannu rises at her elbow. Lalli’s arms are around his neck, his face turned into his father’s collar.  
“They did not,” the anger of a father who was until recently robbed of his child is not quite on par with what a goddess shows, but it is close “I was treating a patient when he came…they told me he was a stillbirth. They told me the body was falling apart even as they held it…tell me, mother, what did you actually bury in the backyard? Whose grave have I been putting flowers on for the last two years?”

Ensi met his stare evenly “I buried a pot.”

“A pot,” Hannu laughs weakly “Alright, I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave and introduce Lalli to his other cousin. When I get back I want both of you out of here. Paju, don’t come back, please, and don’t talk to him. Don’t look at him if you can help it.”

“Hannu, please-”

He was gone with both boys before Paju could finish her plea.

What the goddess said to Ensi and Paju afterwards is only for the three women to know. By the day-break, the entire village knew of Lalli’s return. His reception was one unanimously of excitement and joy- thank the gods he had been spared! Thank the gods he was returned! Up until the year Mikkeli burned, the hunters still left a prime cut, or the first kill of a successful hunting campaign in the mouth of the woods for Lalli’s saviour.

Paju never spoke to her son. Paju never once touched her son. Soon after Lalli turned four, Paju left Mikkeli without any indication of where she might be going and was not heard from again.   
Hannu, meanwhile, devoted his energy to raising his son. He was as good a father as any until Lalli turned eight, and then Hannu was no longer in any position to be taking care of a vulnerable child.

 

“Holy shit.”

It is fourteen years later. Lalli never thought he would laugh while telling this story. Then again, he did not think he would ever tell this story. He certainly could not have guessed it would be told during the small hours of a cold spring’s night in Mora, nor that his audience would be sharing a bed with him.  
Neither of them are completely dressed. Part of the reason his tongue finally loosened probably has something to do with the way they have spent most of the night.

“What? It’s not funny,” protests Emil. He wipes his eyes on the back of his hand “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Your face. You look like a surprised toad.”

Groaning, Emil buries his face in the pillow and says, muffled “Can we not talk about what an ugly crier I am? Oh, gods, I’m sorry…but that’s just awful. I can’t believe that happened to you.”

Lalli shrugs “I survived it.”

“You shouldn’t have had to deal with it in the first place!”

“Em, I was tiny. I barely remember a thing about Mielikki or the woods.” he lays a hand on Emil’s shoulder and squeezes “I’m alright, really.”

Emil lifts his streaked face, slightly less distraught than he was a moment before “You were really suckled by a bear and a lynx?”

“Did I say lynx? I meant wolf. The only lynx is my luonto.”

“That explains a lot.”

Lalli raises an eyebrow “What does it explain?”

“Well it explains why you get really strong when you’re really scared. Why you climb trees all the time. Why you’re addicted to berries and why you’re kinda territorial.”

“I am not territorial, am I?”

“You’re the only person that hisses back at cats.”

“Everyone in my family does it. Watch Tuuri closely. She’s been on edge for three years, trying to keep you from realising she’s just as much of a freak as me. At least Onni doesn’t hide that he has pellets sometimes, and he can do that neck thing.”

This time, they both laugh. Emil lets Lalli mop his eyes properly and gives him a short hug.

“I’m glad you survived it.”

“Good thing I did, or you’d be dying alone.”

“One thing, though…what became of your grandmother? She didn’t disappear or anything?”

“What? Oh, gods no. who do you think trained me?”

Where a moment before there was misty distress there is now a kind of transcendent anger that Lalli normally only sees when someone touches Emil’s hair without permission.  
“You’re serious” Emil straightens “She left you to die in the woods and then she trained you?”

“She was an Old World kid. They saw things in terms of resources and resource-drinkers.”

“That’s no excuse! She was in a damned village, not a military out-post!”

“Yeah. She did fuck up pretty badly with me at first. And don’t worry- I haven’t forgiven her for it, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Emil is just confused now “Wait a minute, I’m confused. All I ever hear about Ensi Hotakainen is what a bad-ass troll killing machine she was. You use her rifle, don’t you? And Onni learned a lot of what he knows about magey stuff from her? And Tuuri thinks she’s the greatest hero in the Known World after Sigrun.”

“Tuuri doesn’t know.”

If Emil was drinking at this moment, he would undoubtedly do a spit-take in Lalli’s face “How the Hel does she not know?”

“Hannu told her he found me on the end of a fishing pole. I guess she’s just forgotten that she didn’t know me for the first two years. We were barely more than babies, you know. And Grandma knew she had to make good with me, or she’d lose her legacy. Onni only got really good at magic after…after the village burned down, so for a while I was the favourite grandson. She taught me everything she knew about magic. She tried to teach me hunting, but, you know.”

“You already knew how to do that?” guesses Emil.

“Benefits of having a hunting goddess for a foster-mom.”

“Is she still around? Mielikki?”

“Yes. We’ve spoken a few times. Remember the first winter? When I killed the moose?”

“Yeah. I distinctly remember that Sigrun cried and hugged you for ten minutes too.”

“She helped with that. She warned me when that Sleipnir thing was coming to us, and that’s pretty much the only reason we didn’t die, because we had those five or ten minutes to prepare.”

“Oh. Cool. Tell her thanks for me.”

“You can. She mentioned wanting to meet you, so she’ll probably turn up soon. She’s mostly around in spring.”

Emil blanches “What? Really? Uh, I’m not sure she really wants to meet me. I’ll probably just embarrass us.”

Lalli rolls his eyes “Well I’m counting on that. I don’t really care as long as you don’t injure anyone. I want you to meet her, Em. She’s important to me.”

“Ok. Whenever you want.” Emil surprises himself with a huge yawn “Sorry.”

“Tired?”

He nods and scoots across the bed, into Lalli’s open arms. Emil is asleep within minutes.

Lalli lies sleepless for a long time. He tries to distract himself, contemplating his partner’s hair, the colour of Emil’s skin, the way he looks when he sleeps, but his thoughts will not let him stray too far for too long.   
In truth, he could no more explain to Emil the way he and his grandmother were than he can to himself.

Lalli knows she loved him- of this, he is sure. Perhaps she always loved him. Perhaps she came to love him once she realised he was not going to go away. A combination of the two seems the most likely possibility.  
The way she taught him tells him that his grandmother loved him. She was a slow and deliberate teacher. Their days finished when they finished; there was no rush to get him back home and out of her hair. She loved to linger over the smaller details of a spell. Sometimes, when she still wore her hair long, she would sit at the same table that she almost knocked flying when he was returned, and tell him the ancient sagas and myths while he stood behind and brushed her hair out.

They loved each other. Even now, Lalli still hates her for what she tried to do to him. He hates to think he might not have had the chance to live with his cousins and meet his friends and love who he loves, whose arms are firm around his waist…the thought that he might have never lived fills Lalli with a fierce hate.  
His grandmother made herself the obvious target in doing what she did. First, to him, and later to the rest of Mikkeli with another mistake. This one Mielikki did not save her from. There was no goddess available afterwards to chastise her.

Not only did Ensi abandon him as a child, but she ended up getting his home burned right out from under his feet.  
Yet when Lalli thinks on her and inevitably of her death, he cannot stop himself from crying. 

He is only glad that Emil is asleep now, and will not see Lalli in his moment of weakness, stranded between a profound hate and a love for his grandmother that is even more so.


	95. 15: Silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or lack thereof. The crew enjoys a meal together in an alternate world, where they share a common language.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to take a look at the team dynamic with the language barriers removed. Granted, it removes a lot of the beauty of the way their relationships manage to work even without linguistic comprehension. Then again we all do it with modern AUs or 'so and so many years later' AUs, so here's a look at the canon world with the glaring admission of the canon language differences.
> 
> And I'll do a Lazy8 here and recommend some nice, friendly listening to set the scene. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6JnowS4774

Dinner around the fire. Actual dinner, as Sigrun says, because a meal isn’t a meal if there isn’t

“A piece of flesh in it.” finishes Sigrun.

“Do you eat meat with breakfast then?” asks Emil.

He chases a chunk of venison around his bowl. The wily piece of meat slips around the rim of the spoon or dodges away at the last second, just when he thinks he has caught it, using the remainder of the broth to aid its escape. If it were not for the dining etiquette that has been hammered into him from a young age Emil would just pour what’s left straight into his mouth. But he can’t make himself do it.

“Most of the time,” Sigrun has no problem using her fingers to catch an errant piece of venison “Meat isn’t always easy to come by on the military base. Sometimes we get hemmed in by trolls, and the local farmers aren’t eager to slaughter their livestock every time that happens just to put a bit of bacon beside my morning tea.”

Unexpectedly, Mikkel snorts. A single bead of golden broth drips from his nose before he can mop up the damage. Tuuri breaks into honking giggles beside him and gives herself a gold beard before she, too, scrabbles for a rag to clean it away.

Sigrun cocks an eyebrow “What’s so funny?”

“I’m sorry,” Mikkel wheezes “The image of you drinking tea peacefully is a little bit much for my imagination. I’m afraid I just don’t believe that.”

She throws up a free hand in indignation “I’m not always a blood-crazy warrior, woman! Sometimes I like to sit in one place for over an hour and, you know, just relax.”

‘Woman’ has become synonymous with the more gentle insults, like ‘you idiot’ or ‘dork’ or ‘insensitive nerd’- basically anything meant to remind the target of their place in the world. Tuuri once explained how the seniors in her first garage (exclusively men) would refer to her as ‘girl’ and later ‘woman’ at the end of every order. Sigrun thought this was so pigishly sexist and brilliant at the same time that she began to call everyone ‘woman’ when they toed the line.  
It has caught on; they all do it to each other now. The longer the winter lasts, the larger their strange personalised vernacular grows. Tuuri suspects she is going to have a hard time swearing properly when she returns to the Known World, because right now, the worst thing the team-mates can call each other is a ‘Lempo-humping son of a log’, which originated from Lalli cussing out a crow that scared the life out of him by exploding out of a tree when he wasn’t expecting it. Such was the shock that he could not formulate an appropriate insult and just spat the first thing his brain offered. Sigrun thought this was brilliant too.

“How does a captain relax?” asks Emil.  
He likes prompting Sigrun along in her anecdotes. In his days with the Cleansers, Emil was never part of the group and nor did he sit around the campfire to hear the stories of his superiors. It was mutually decided on the first day that Emil did not fit in with the rest of the ranks and the other Cleansers, in their endless kindness, took it upon themselves to exclude Emil from everything.

So now little gives him more pleasure than just sitting around the fire and talking at the end of a long day.

“A captain relaxes like a real live human being. I knit-”

A hoot of disbelief from Reynir “You knit?” he laughs “Really?”

“Really! You’re not the only one around here who can make a sweater, you know. I bet I could out-sweater you any day.”

“Oh lords,” sighs Tuuri “Here we go.”

Reynir makes an uncharacteristic gesture; he sneers. It does not suit his face at all. His face is accustomed to smiles, from the beaming to the apologetic, and always looks uncomfortable when it branches out into some other.   
But this is knitting. Reynir will not suffer to be challenged in the one art he has mastered “Alright, you can prove it to me tomorrow.”

“A knitting contest?” Emil has to be slapped on the back by Lalli, nearly inhaling his soup.

“A knitting battle!” corrects Sigrun “One the minstrels would sing about for years to come if the minstrels were still a thing.”

“Old people at a Finnish community centre.”

She looks to Lalli “Come again?”

“Old people at a Finnish community centre will sing your praises.” repeats Lalli, with his own brand of quiet confidence. He knows exactly what he’s talking about. The others will catch up in a moment “They’re the group that wander around singing all the time. In Keuruu you can’t walk into a shop without having somebody’s grandmother bleating a saga in the next aisle over.”

Mikkel snorts again “Will you people please stop making me laugh when my mouth is full.”

Lalli continues “And when you get a bunch of old Finnish people in a group, all they want to do is bitch out their grandchildren and sing.”

“Oh my gods, yes!” Tuuri flutters a hand in excitement and narrowly misses poking Reynir’s eye out with the handle of her spoon “Grandma Ensi used to do that! First she’d bitch me and Lalli out for not being, like, made of nails and sisu like her, even though we were eight- like ‘oh Tuuri-bear and Lalli-cat are strong no doubt, but they wouldn’t have survived my upbringing’- duh, Grandma! Hardly anyone did. And as soon as she was done with that she’d start a song up and before you knew it, all the old people were caterwauling. It sounded good sometimes, but mostly like cats fighting.”

Lalli shakes his head “The cats were quieter.”

“Emil, do you want seconds?” asks Reynir.

He has the ladle out with a second helping before Emil can answer, but Emil isn’t about to complain. Deer for dinner, tasting all the better because Lalli and Sigrun brought it down only that afternoon. The Hotakainens spent the late afternoon skinning and cleaning the carcass- Tuuri still wears a few spots of blood in her grey hair as a souvenir from the afternoon’s work. No one has pointed them out yet.

“Where’s Kitty?” Reynir pinches a choice piece of meat from the edge of the ladle “Has she eaten enough tonight?”

Meanwhile, Lalli is nudging Kitty’s nose out of his bowl “She’s going to starve me. Go to Reynir. He has something for you.”

The car obeys. Whatever truce she and Lalli obey is a tenuous one. No one is quite sure what the terms are or when the covenant was made, but at least they aren’t hissing at each other anymore, and Lalli will sometimes even allow her to sit in his lap.

“That cat is spoilt.” remarks Mikkel “Getting hand-fed.”

“Are you jealous?” Tuuri brandishes a full spoon of the broth “I’ll even make engine noises for you.”

“Woman, you test me.”

“Woman, accept my kindness!”

“Where did you find this deer anyway?” Reynir is dangling the cat from a finger as she sucks away the last globe of broth from his finger “Tastes grass-fed. Really nice. We didn’t get to eat stuff like this at home. It was all mutton.”

“Just like your friends.” says Emil.

The boys exchange a good-natured punch to the shoulder, grinning.

Sigrun glances at Lalli, asking permission to tell the story in her way, and he gives it with a small nod.  
It is when she lays aside her cutlery and the impish smile he now knows to be her ‘story-time’ spreads across her face that Lalli wonders if he should not have muttered the tale out himself.

“So, there we are, me and Lals. It was a dark and stormy night-”

“It was a mild afternoon.” corrects Lalli.

“It was a mild afternoon, sinister as Hel’s parlour, nevertheless, and Lalli already knows something is coming.”

“I told you it was a deer.”

Sigrun nods grimly “He told me it was a deer. So I asked, what kind? Is it infected? Is it a fawn?”

“You wanted to know if we could eat it.”

“I wanted to know if we could eat it. I admit, I was slavering. Wax just isn’t good for the liver, you know? I swear I could make a candle out of my sh-”

Lalli clears his throat “There’s not much story. A deer came up on us, Sigrun killed it.”

Sigrun is offended by this abbreviation “Lalli! There was a fantastic battle of mighty might! Don’t skimp on the details! In fact, let me, just sit back on your blond and let me tell the rest of the story. So once he told me it was a deer, like, the edible kind, this sensation filled me. I can only describe it as a berserker rage, but towards food. Em, Tuuri, you guys probably haven’t had a berserker moment yet. But Reynir, you’re a shepherd. You must have gone off your braid at a sheep before, right?”

Reynir’s expression grows ponderous “Uh, no, not a sheep. Once at a feral dog, though. I didn’t want to hurt it so I just ran after it screaming until it went away.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what I mean. And Lalli, I know you’ve had one because I saw you take down that giraffe beast last month. It was that. That rage that just consumes you faster than fire. It occupies every tendon. But for food. My mouth was a swamp already thinking about all the food possibilities. But I didn’t have a knife with me, did I? What an over-sight. I swear, I’m going soft in the head. When I left the Tank I just took my rifle with me because I didn’t want any extra weight, and I figured, hey, if anything that the rifle can’t handle comes and attacks me, I’ll just throw my Finn at it.” Sigrun reaches over and pats Emil on the shoulder “This is why I need my right-hand Viking around. To keep me from straightening our Finns out like spears and throwing ‘em.”

“Lalli-cat’s cheekbones could probably do some damage.” Tuuri gives her cousin a kiss on the cheek, then falls back dramatically, pretending her mouth is filled with blood.  
Lalli gives her a gentle nudge with his boot and sends her falling backwards off the log.

Once Tuuri is righted and Mikkel has finished mopping the broth from his nose, Sigrun resumes her story “Where was I? Berserker rage for food. Anyway, I wanted that deer so bad I didn’t care how I got it. I was even going to shoot it, which is mega-gross, by the way, and totally not how the gods want it done. You should go toe-to-hoof with your prey. At least acknowledge it as the animal it is, you know? So I’m explaining this to Lalli while we’re hiding and waiting for the deer, and he passes me his knife silently.” Sigrun holds up her forefinger “A knife about as big as my forefinger. A dainty knife. A gods-damned dainty, down-right cute lil’ knife. I’m thinking, what is this, baby’s first knife?”

“You said that out loud.”

“That I did! Lalli sure shut me up, though. He told me ‘you’re always bragging about how you can kill a troll with your fingernail clippings, so this shouldn’t be a challenge for you’ and what could I do but accept the challenge? I wasn’t about to let the woman injure my pride like that. I took the knife. And not a second later the deer strolls into the clearing. So let me set the scene for you. Our flame-haired hero approaching the most magnificent, meaty buck she’s ever seen since,” she slaps Mikkel fondly on the chest “She shook hands with this bastard right here, and her scout standing off to the side, either like a proud parent-figure or a judgemental cat. I didn’t know which at the time.”

“The cat.” suggests Tuuri.

By now, Emil has his arm around Lalli’s shoulder and they are basically sitting on top of each other. Lalli is too contented with the comfort of his position to move to punish his cousin for the slight, so he just blinks at her insolently. 

“The deer doesn’t know to be afraid of humans. It does know to be afraid of things that speak, though, ‘cos I guess the trolls around here repeat their dying words all the time. I didn’t think about that until it was too late. I tried to beckon it over with, you know, a few comforting words.”

“’hello supper, how’d you like to meet my stomach’?” recalls Lalli.

This time it is Mikkel’s turn to fall backwards off his log. Mercifully, he has nothing in his mouth to scorch his nostrils. 

“The point is the deer bolted. And so did I. It was my mighty hunger that allowed me to over-take it, I believe.”

“Whoa, I’m calling Loki-talk. You’ve got to be making that up.” says Emil, looking to Lalli “Did she really run a stag down?”

Lalli nods.

“That must have been terrifying to witness.”

“I’m shaking just thinking about it. The poor deer.” Reynir stares sadly into his bowl and seems to seriously consider giving the venison a conciliatory stroke.  
Kitty yowls for more and his elbow.

“Indeed. I have just wet my pants in sympathetic terror.” agrees Mikkel “Here, the cat can finish my bowl. I’m full.”

“Anyway to make a short hunt even shorter, I got it and cut is throat. It died fast, Freckles, no need to worry about suffering. Lalli got his luonto to float it back, which was super weird to watch, and here we are, eating the fruits of our little adventure. Em, you have to come out tomorrow. Even if nothing exciting happens I need my Swede, you know? It just isn’t international enough if I only have the scout.”

“Leave me at home tomorrow.” suggests Lalli, his eyes at half-mast “I’ll guard the civvies.”

Tuuri scoffs “You’ll nap the whole time.”

“I can protect you in my sleep.”

“Oh yeah? Well I could drive in my sleep.”

“No you couldn’t.”

“Fine! Tomorrow you protect me in your sleep then I’ll drive us away in my sleep. That sound fair?”

“Fine.”

“Neither of you will be doing anything of the sort,” Mikkel pats each Hotakainen on the head, though his hand hovers above Lalli for a second before the younger Hotakainen leans into his hand, granting him permission to touch “You’ll both be put to work. I have a chore list longer than my venerable father’s bear to tackle tomorrow and I intend to make use of all hands available.”

Reynir raises Kitty’s paw gently “Look who’s volunteering! Will you accept paws?”

“Certainly.”

Suddenly, Sigrun yawns “Oh gods, I need to sleep. The day just caught up with me.”

Emil rubs his eyes “Me too.”

“Aw you light-weights! This is the best part of the day.” protests Tuuri, already gathering up the dishes so she can wash them “Makes me glad we all speak Swedish, you know?”

“Except Mikkel.” says almost everyone in unison. Reynir misses the cue and has to rush to catch up.

“What would it even be like if we didn’t all understand each other?” Sigrun stands and stretches with another mighty yawn “Gods, I don’t think I could stand the silence.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like the idea of Sigrun and Lalli forming a strange but comfortable friendship somewhere down the line


	96. 59: No way out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short look at the fierce competition between the Tank's two cats

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Kitty's perspective.
> 
> FYI: Blood-letter not as in the written 'letter', but as in 'blood letting'. Kitty knows a warrior when she sees one, apparently.

I am a being of many names and much power. They call me Kisa, Kisu, Missekat, Pusekatt and Kissekat, and when they speak any of my names, it is with the reverence of devoted followers. Except for Large Cat. Large Cat treats me as the god of light would treat the god of dark; his enemy, his inevitable demise, his replacement.  
I do not blame Large Cat for feeling threatened by my presence on Metal Cat. Anyone who looks at us can tell easily I am the obvious superior. I am mighty, I am made of triumph and power, while he is merely made of whatever squishy fillings it is that awkwards have on the inside. And anger. Large Cat has much bitterness for the world.

Now I’m not certain how anyone could have had a crueller introduction to the world than I did, but apparently Large Cat thinks his suffering permits him to behave like a moody kitten.  
He is a strange cat.

This morning, when I rise, I am careful to step on his face as I depart from the warmth of the curve of Mom’s neck. For Mom, my claws are sheathed and my steps are gentle, but for Large Cat, I decide he must understand I am not here to be a competitor (for I have already won) so I walk roughly across his face with unsheathed claws.  
Large Cat wakes within a second and pushes me from his face, gagging on the paw which slips into his mouth.

Yes, I think, taste defeat.

And in the language which cats exchange in mostly stares and silence, he responds sharply: if it were not against my code to harm tiny things I would have eaten you the first week you arrived.  
Then turns to the wall, slides underneath Mom’s bunk, and falls soundly back to sleep.

Cannibalism is one of his favourite threats. I doubt he would ever eat me, but you never know with Large Cat. 

Now that I have reminded Large Cat of his place beneath my paws, I decide it is time to rouse the others. Mom can sleep for a little longer because Mom needs his sleep, and it is pleasant to me to glance back at Mom and see him in a cocoon of woollen warmness with his yellow head poking out of the top.  
But Hairball deserves my wrath. Hairball lies next to Large Cat on the floor- they seem to tolerate each other much more easily, if their proximity is anything to judge. Like all awkwards, Hairball is an infuriating combination of clumsy, stupid and frustrating, with an extra dash of sweet thrown in. Much of my kitten-hood memories were formed from the collar of his shirt. 

He is almost like a second Mom. I know to whom I owe my allegiance- the owner of the mighty hand which fished me from my watery would-be grave of course- but I also feel some degree of gratitude to Hairball for essentially hand-rearing me while Mom was out in the Sickness, killing things and gathering the paper trophies my awkwards favour so much.  
The love I feel for Hairball is tested, though, by his hair. When I was younger it was a joyous play-thing. Now it can either be a play-thing or an insidious net of red and danger and death, seeking to ensnare me forever when I sought to merely bat at the tip of his long hair-limb. 

So I feel obliged to communicate my displeasure with Hairball; to tell him he must rein in the bloodlust of his hair lest face losing me and my wonder to its ravenous depths.  
I do this by stepping on his chest and waking him with a gentle nudge to the chin. Then when I am sure he is conscious I turn and present him with my backside, dangerously close to the tip of his protruding awkward’s nose.

“Kitty!” he chirps in distress.

I turn and stare at him over my shoulder saying, this sight is the one you should become used to, unless you can control your insane hair.

Hairball pushes me away so gently I would think it was a breeze on my flank if I didn’t see his hand.  
He has been tortured enough for the morning, and the next on my list is Second Mom. Where Hairball failed to become my second mom because he had other things to do, like drawing his strange-smelling runes and bothering Large Cat, Second Mom literally has nothing to do, most of the time, but his chores.  
Early in my stay in the Metal Cat I elected to help him in any ways I could. I follow him about while he does his works, often aided by Hairball, and yowl advice. When he hangs up the awkwards’ clothes on the lines, I swat any dangling strings or sleeves to make sure the clothes know they are being watched and will be punished if they misbehave. When it is time to feed the awkwards, I brave the hot steam to push my face into every dish and give it a good sniff for any trace of the sickness. He is particularly thankful of this last little bit of assistance, I know, because he always plucks me away from the dishes and begs me to take a break from my scouting. Concerned for my health. It is only natural that he should become Second Mom.

Second Mom is asleep on his side with his face to the wall. As such, I have to sink my claws into his spine to get myself up on his head and need to poke him a few times before I find his nose, which is what I prefer to swat at. I find awkwards tend to leap out of their sleep when their noses are accosted.  
Second Mom immediately groans and pulls his pillow over his face. He says a thing in his awkward-speak that might be a plea to let him sleep or a heartfelt thanks to me for thinking to rouse him. The latter, I think. That will do. Once I have finished with Second Mom, there is no way for him to fall back to sleep.

Above his sleeping platform is Squishy’s sleeping platform. I have learned my lesson about disturbing her; Squishy is not afraid to hiss. She understands nothing of the cat’s language either, so what she says is garbled and wildly offensive if it makes any sense at all.  
And as usual, Blood-letter has gotten up before I have had the chance to wake her up. she is the only awkward who is consistently conscious before I am. 

This morning, like most, she manages to sneak up behind me and peels me off of Second Mom’s shoulder. I let out a mighty squeak of protest.  
Blood-letter pops me on her shoulder with a few stern words, spoken through an awkward’s smile, and carries me into the place where Squishy sits and screams to make the Metal Cat move. Popping me in Squishy’s chair (where most of the screaming happens), Blood-letter plants herself at my paws and resumes cleaning that weird detachable claw of metal that she and Large Cat are so fond of using. If I live with these awkwards for a thousand moons, I swear, I will never understand their weird hunting customs.

Blood-letter would be my favourite female awkward if I was forced to pick. I have too many favourites among the males, and whatever it is that Hairball is, because he smells of both the male gender and the female, though the female is more of an accent to his overall woolly scent. But, yes, the ease with which Blood-letter balances a friendly personality and an unquenchable taste for the blood of the Sick gives her a special place in my heart.

When I grow up I’m going to be exactly like she is. 

While I watch Blood-letter clean her false claws, the other awkwards slowly begin to stir. Large Cat rises first. He and Blood-letter acknowledge each other with simple glances. Quickly, I catch Large Cat’s eyes.

Do not, I say, attempt to steal my seat. I am the mighty Kitty and I will destroy you with one swipe of my powerful paws should you dare to challenge me.

And he says, don’t make me sit on you.

It is all we can do not to get into a hissing match in front of Blood-letter like a pair of squabbling kittens.

Second Mom is up next. As usual, he bustles straight outside without looking at me, only rumbling something in his tongue to the other two to let them know he is conscious. Squishy goes out after him with her strange false-face on, and Hairball goes after them so fast he bumps into Squishy and basically bounces her out the door.  
I chuckle to myself. I like a bit of slapstick in the mornings to remind me the world isn’t all dark and terrible. Most of it is, though.

The awkwards take some time to get ready for the Sick world. I am ready to face the Sickness the moment I get up. If I do not poof to a mighty size and hiss my wise warnings, then who will keep the Sick-beasts in their place? Certainly not Large Cat! He wastes too much valuable hissing-time staring at things with his big awkward’s eyes. He should know better by now.  
I announce my readiness for the day by following each of my awkwards in turn, save Large Cat, who is no more one of my awkwards than I am his cat. I shriek my blood-lust to Blood-letter. I climb Second Mom’s leg to demonstrate my agility. I bite Hairball’s braid to show I am fearless, though his hair is fearsome indeed. I bat Squishy’s hand away when she tries to pet me because we have no time for frivolities when the world needs to be hissed at! Finally, I curl around Mom’s legs and purr loudly until he picks me up.

Yes, I say with my eyes, carry me into the Sickness and I will hiss it into submission! I will not cower this time- I promise.

Usually I break my promise within the first five seconds of confrontation, but I am getting stronger and braver with each encounter. I like to think they have noticed this.

I do not understand what Mom says in return. Only my name. But I like my vantage point from his shoulder. It does not matter that Mom is the second shortest of the awkwards, after Squishy, because I love to stand on my awkwards and survey the Metal Cat’s insides like the mighty queen I will someday be recognised as.  
My patience is its own reward; soon, they are gathered outside in the furs they wear to conquer the Sickness and I am rewarded for my efforts to get them outside by being put down Second Mom’s shirt. This means I am to accompany them on their quest today! Excellent!

Unfortunately Large Cat is also coming along. If I had known this, I would have wriggled down the front of Mom’s shirt just to see the expression on his strange pointy face. He reacts less and less to my closeness to Mom. I think we are getting to the point where we can share Mom without much controversy, and I am not sure whether to let this happen or fight it with every inch of my mighty being. For us there is no way out of the competition, but neither each other’s company. To rid myself of Large Cat I would have to kill him. or convince the others to do it for me. I don’t think they will go for it.

So for today, I sit in the front of Second Mom’s shirt with my front-paws poking over the edge and mewl eagerly to let them know I am prepared for today’s activities. I am strong. I will lead us into the Sick world. I will hiss at everything that dares to smell even a little bit weird. Second Mom’s heart-beat bumps against my back and every now and then I turn around and thump it back, hoping it might shut up for just a moment so I can mewl louder.

When we depart from the Metal Cat, I scrabble around the back of Second Mom’s shirt to say goodbye to Hairball and Squishy. I feel sometimes that we neglect these two. So they are susceptible to the Sickness- this, I can smell easily- does that mean they should be locked away in the Metal Cat day after day?  
Probably does, actually. They have no business exploring a world whose only function is to make them sick. I also yowl a goodbye to Metal Cat. Metal Cat is a sullen silent thing and only speaks when they move, but I won’t give up on being friends just yet. They would be an invaluable ally for the time, and it will come, when I must show Large Cat why I am the alpha cat and why he belongs beneath my paws.

But now is not the time to battle my fellow Metal Cat-mates. The Sickness is our enemy.

I climb back into the front of Second Mom’s shirt and let out a mighty mewl. I am fierce. I am power. I am might.  
I am also getting a pat on the head from Second Mom and quite satisfied with my life, short though it has been so far. There is still plenty of time left to me with which to conquer the world.


	97. 95: Advertisement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fire. Fire is everywhere and Sigrun is sick of this nonsense.

“Why is everything on fire?”

Sigrun still marvels that there was a point in her career, in her personal life as well, where that question was not one that she commonly asked.

“There were trolls,” says Tuuri through her mask. She has to shout this over the crackle of the little fires scattered around the clearing, and because she is about thirty feet up a large tree “Lots of trolls.”

“Is everyone alright?” asks Sigrun.

“Yes,” Mikkel helps Lalli up out of a snow-drift and dusts him off in that fussy mother-hen way of his “I did not hear any bones snap when I was thrown.”

“Where’s Reynir?”

At the sound of his name, Reynir pops his head out of the foliage of another pine-tree. The one adjacent to Tuuri’s, in which he is about fifteen feet higher than Tuuri. He waves to her quite cheerfully for a non-immune civvie who has apparently just been chased up a tree by trolls. Sparing a glance at the fires, Sigrun sees they are feeding off blackened bodies, like broken trees and the corpses of livestock. Makes Sigrun glad that she was not around to see whatever it was that attacked them, so soon before lunch.  
There is the smell of singed sap and needles that makes Sigrun wonder if he might not have shot off one of those runes he’s been getting so good at. Are all of these fires Emil’s fault? And speaking of Emil, where did he go?

She does not need to ask this; a few seconds later, Emil stumbles around the back of the Tank. He’s in his uniform except for the jacket, and his under-shirt is scored across the chest. A trickle of blood seeps through the fabric. The cat is also attached to his arm in the way that only terrified felines can attach themselves to human flesh.  
“I killed that thing that went under the Tank with Lalli’s boot. Uh, here you go.”

With the arm that is not covered in cat, Emil tosses Lalli one of this thigh-highs, which the other quickly struggles into. He brushes away Mikkel’s attempts to help patiently.

Feeling a little excluded and useless, Sigrun drops her rifle in the snow and goes over to the nearest fire. She begins to kick snow over it, taking care not to touch the body at the bottom. Gristle pops in the heat. The smell coming off of it reminds her of the time the slaughter-house in Dalsnes burned down. No livestock or staff were in there at the time, thank goodness, but the pieces of meat unfit for human consumption were set to the side for the base’s dogs.  
As long as she lives, she is never going to forget the smell of the most putrid pieces of a mammal’s body burning in a fierce heat. This is not quite the same kind of smell. Perhaps that slaughter-house smell’s younger sibling who aspires to be like its elder, and is doing a very good job of fulfilling that dream so far?

“Gross.”

“Sorry,” Emil carefully plucks Kitty from his arm, which quickly begins to gush blood “I kind of…didn’t know what else to do? There’s a troll around the back of the Tank too. I would have burned that one but it got Lalli’s boot.”

“How the Hel did a troll pry a thigh-high off our scout’s leg?” satisfied that she has buried one fire sufficiently, Sigrun moves onto the next.

“Well it got Lalli by the leg so he undid the clasps, and it…I guess it thought the leg was still inside when the boot popped off? And it ran off. So I chased it and killed it.”

“With what?”

Emil lowers the cat gently into the snow, his face red with embarrassment “Nothing. Just my hands.”

Tuuri laughs from her tree “You should have heard him howl! Um, would anyone want to come and get me down? I could climb down on my own but I think I might be shaking too hard to move.”

Somehow Lalli understands her request. He scales the tree with the agility of a frightened squirrel and descends a moment later with his cousin slung over his shoulder.

“Y’know,” says Sigrun, kicking snow over a two-headed monstrosity “I don’t think I’m going to leave you guys alone anymore. No more solo hunts for me, because every time I leave the camp on my own, it’s like an advertisement for everything in the Silent World to come and attack you.”

“Sounds good to me.” says Mikkel “Emil, you’re bleeding everywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is so weirdly short. I have a lot of things to do today and my brain does not want to be creative apparently. We're almost to the end of this thing. It might even end before the weekend is up?


	98. 6: Breaking away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's always 'a Talk' that one has to have when being initiated into a new world. When Reynir discovers a dead mage's space, Lalli has to give him that 'Talk'

Lalli can hear them talking from his spot on the roof of the Tank. At this late stage in his studies of Norwegian (coming up on about four months now) he can understand some of what they’re saying. Sigrun complains to Mikkel about the lack of excitement in the area. Mikkel offers to create some by summoning a troll for her to battle. Sigrun is a tad too enthusiastic about the idea.   
And Emil and Tuuri are busy with another conversation, just at his feet. While Tuuri swears underneath the steaming hood and instructs Emil on which tools to hand her, Emil is talking about something else entirely. Lalli catches the word ‘dog’ a few times, so either he’s talking about the animal Lalli ushered on towards doggy-Tuonela at the beginning of the winter or he’s talking about the dog he left in his childhood home. According to Tuuri, Emil is a dog person. Makes Lalli wonder why they get along so easily.

And as for wherever Reynir has gone, Lalli can’t quite summon up enough energy to care. Reynir is out of his hair for a few moments. In spite of how much the other mage is growing on him, Lalli still welcomes the relative silence that comes whenever Reynir is not around. They don’t share a language but you wouldn’t guess from the amount of time Reynir spends chattering in his ear.

“Lalli!”

Speak of Lempo and one of his demons shall appear. Lalli glances over the side of the Tank and sees Reynir. Grudgingly, he offers Reynir a hand up. Reynir doesn’t even have to stretch to reach his hand. It never ceases to amaze him how long Reynir’s arms are- like some kind of half-giant love-child, except that Reynir has never expressed the urge to cannibalise his team mates. That Lalli knows of.  
Once Reynir is on top of the Tank (with remarkably little trouble thanks to his long legs), he starts to blither cheerfully. Lalli makes no attempt to understand him nor to pretend that he is trying to. Reynir’s words are like so much bird-song; it can be pleasant and musical for the first few minutes, but after a while of an incessant chorus, you just get sick of it and want to drive the birds away with stones and harsh words against their mothers.

Lalli is content to drift off into space. He has no job to do. No obligation to be awake or aware of his surroundings. Eventually, Reynir’s voice lulls him off to sleep.  
And of course the literal moment Lalli sits up and stretches in his haven, Reynir is there. In fact while he stretches he ends up bopping Reynir on the nose with the back of his hand.

“Sorry.”

“No it’s my bad, I shouldn’t have hung over you like that.” Reynir rubs his nose good-naturedly.

“How’d you fall asleep so quick?”

“I’m a shepherd. We take micro-naps all the time. For ten or fifteen minutes while the sheep, you know, just sheep around, and the shepherd is too tired to breathe without a conscious effort, that’s when the shepherd leans on their crook and conks out.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t you ever do stuff like that when you scouted?”

Lalli thinks back to the odd night spent in the woods “Not micro-naps. You just asked for the hospitality of a local animal. I slept next to the foxes and big cats. Sometimes the wolves. Wolves are kind of weird about letting non-wolves spend time with them. It’s symbiotic. The scout gets a place to sleep, the animals get extra body-warmth without having to add another mouth to feed…why are you looking at me like that?”

The expression Lalli is having trouble translating is one of profound shock and awe. If Reynir thought Lalli was aloof and mysterious and awesome before, Reynir now thinks of him as accomplished and astounding, and considers himself lucky to be sharing a raft with him.

“You cuddled with animals?”

“No. Not cuddling. I asked for hospitality and got it.”

“Like, with deer and everything?”

“No. You don’t sleep near prey animals unless you want to be targeted too.”

“Can you talk to animals?”

“Dear gods, please shut him up.” mutters Lynx from the edge of the haven. He has pressed himself to the extreme edge of the defensive bubble in an effort to get away from Reynir. Unfortunately, Dog has just found Lynx and is quite eager to remind Lynx of how much he likes him with some of the same incessant babbling his human counterpart prefers in place of conversation.

“Is there a reason you followed me?” asks Lalli.

Reynir frowns “Um, there was. Hey, Dog! Do you remember why we followed Lalli and Lynx?”

“Because we love them.” says Dog, slobbering on Lynx’s shoulder.

“No there was an actual reason. Oh! Um, I had a weird encounter last night, after I left your haven? I came back to try to tell you about it, but you weren’t here.”

Lalli feels a brief pang of guilt. Of course he wasn’t there when Reynir actually needed his help; he had been out investigating the barrow. Emil wasn’t there. Emil hadn’t been in his barrow the last four times Lalli checked, which means that he’s either up and walking around or has been dragged off by something else. Outwardly, Emil shows no signs of the intense distress that would accompany having your spiritual avatar being kidnapped.

“What?”

“This big piece of land close to my haven just fell into the ocean.”

“What.”

“I said-”

“I heard you. Come on.” Lalli slides off the raft into the water “Show me where you saw it.”

Reynir and Lalli’s havens started far apart. There was water between them and a few mountains besides, but all of that has gradually scooted out of their way, off to the side, so that their havens can grow closer. Now Lalli can run to Reynir’s without getting that much out of breath, if he wants to. Normally he runs in the other direction.

“What’s going on?” Reynir splashes after him “Should I be worried?”

“Not for yourself.”

“Can we help them? Um, whoever’s in trouble?” Reynir reaches the bank first and pulls Lalli up before Lalli can protest “I don’t feel good about leaving people in trouble.”

“They’re already dead.”

“Oh. Ok.”

They run. Reynir is fast by the natural virtue of long legs. Lalli is shorter than he is (by a good chunk, because no one is as tall as Reynir), but faster by the virtue of relentless and sometimes cruel training from his cousin. 

“There are hundreds of things in this world that want to kill you!” Onni was fond of shouting from the seat of the tractor that he would use to spur Lalli to his feet “And I’ll be damned if you die of one that can be outrun! Now run, you imp, run or be run over!”

By the time they reach the edge of Reynir’s sheep-strewn haven, Reynir has broken a light sweat and breathes deeply. He staggers to a stop beside Lalli and grasps his shoulder for support “Gods above, you are fast. Why are you so fast?”

“Same reason I don’t like tractors.”

Fortunately, Lalli can see nothing wrong with Reynir’s haven. It amazes him how afraid he was that Reynir might be in danger; the rolling, rocky green and the crags of little cliffs overhead soothe the flush of fear under his skin. The sheep plod about and chew on the grass casually. The ram of the herd stands on a crag to over-look his ewes with an expression of complete smugness.  
Sensing his relief, Reynir smiles “I’m ok. No reason to worry.”

Lalli thinks about telling Reynir that he wasn’t worried. He thinks the better of it and shrugs “There’s one thing to be thankful for.”

“Um, it’s around the side. It’s on the far side of my haven. Come on, we’ll just go around.”

They circle around the haven quickly. Havens tend to be much more expansive on the inside than they appear from the outside. The smaller a haven looks to any spiritual predator, the less chance of a predator attempting to take over the territory and move themselves in. Reynir doesn’t know this, of course, which means he’s just naturally blessed with a safe haven.  
Around Reynir’s haven (and now Lalli’s) are a series of criss-crossing streams that are all thin enough to be jumped. Lalli has no doubt that these streams are deep, and the glacial water they carry is melt run-off from Tuonela’s ice. He doesn’t mention this to Reynir. Onni is the one handling Reynir’s magical education (Lalli isn’t sure how Onni can teach anyone without a tractor handy) and Lalli doesn’t want to deal with the barrage of questions that would come from letting one little fact like this slip.

For a few moments, Reynir leads the way, catching his foot twice when crossing streams and both times barely avoiding a plunge into Tuonela melt thanks to Lalli grabbing him by the collar. By the time the meadows turn to woods again, Lalli is just holding onto Reynir by the end of his braid. He doesn’t trust Reynir to stay on his own two feet. This makes him wonder why he trusts Reynir to know where they are going at all.  
Shepherd’s intuition? Something like that.

“Be careful where you step. I’m not sure how much more of it has fallen.”

“What is the hairy annoyance talking about?” asks Lynx. Lalli waves a menacing fist over his head to let Lynx know his contributions are not appreciated, and clips the luonto on the flank.

Luckily, Reynir doesn’t hear his sceptic. And when Lalli sees what Reynir has been talking about Lalli doesn’t care about the sceptic. 

The woods are cracked. Ahead of them, the woods have cracked jaggedly like a seam torn from thread that frays behind it with the force. Ground stands straight but splintered. The space beneath it is an empty blackness that makes Lalli’s stomach sink.  
A pit has opened up in the middle of the woods. About fifteen metres across, yawning endlessly.

Reynir gasps “It was…it was still here. There was still a haven, last time I was here. The ground was breaking up around it,” he points to a short out-cropping of rock “That was a bridge to the haven! I just checked it was still there before I came to get you.”

Lalli lets go of Reynir’s braid, grasping his shoulder instead, to keep from falling. Looking into those endless depths makes his legs incredibly weak “If you ever see anything like this again, don’t go near it.”

“Why?”

“That’s death,” Lalli nods towards the pit “What it looks like here. When a soul’s infected beyond saving.”

Reynir’s eyes are wide “That happens?”

“Yes.”

“How-”

“I don’t know.” says Lalli too quickly, because he does know, because his grandmother demonstrated clearly just how this might happen back in Mikkeli “Just…if you’re ever near a haven that starts going down, don’t go near it. Don’t try to help the owner. They’re already dead,” hopefully, he does not add, or they’re going to die in agonising pain. 

“So when someone like us dies then their haven dies too?”

“Falls away into…that. Then the dreamscape grows over it.”

“How soon will that happen?”

“Soon.” Lalli nudges Reynir back towards his haven “Come on.”

“Dog! What part of ‘infected beyond saving’ makes you think it’s a good idea to get closer to that thing?”

Over their heads, the much larger Lynx has taken ahold of Dog by the scruff of his neck and carries him away from the space over the pit.

“But I smell something!” protests Dog “Something ancient!”

“So stop smelling. It probably wants to kill you and eat your corpse.”

In spite of having his back to the pit, Lalli only feels all the more exposed. This is why he does not mind when Reynir links his arm through Lalli’s and walks so close to him that he is nearly on top of his boots.

“Is that what happens to us?” Reynir’s voice is low “We just break away and dissolve?”

“That? No. Not unless we’re infected. Our havens wait for us to come around again and change if they need to change.”

“Oh. That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard…the Rash can just wipe a person out like that…gods.” Reynir falls silent.

The next thing Lalli hears out of him is the most high-pitched scream he has ever heard someone emit in their sleep. He jolts into consciousness and finds Reynir in mid-thrash, about to go over the side of the Tank. Lalli grabs him by the collar and backhands him once, twice, and a third time for good measure.

Tuuri pokes her head around the side of the hood “What the fuck?”

“I think he’s having-” Reynir sags onto Lalli’s shoulder and starts to cry softly “-a bad dream.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jeez Reynir. I know you're scared, dude, but you're fine. Onni will protect you with his tears. Lalli might just watch, honestly, because he has to put up with so much of your nonsense at night, you sprawling sleeper, you.


	99. 100: The end

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of one thing is the beginning of another- specifically, a repeat of the former. If that makes sense at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to end my work on the prompt challenge one prompt early. This is both because I'd like to move onto other works and can't, really, with my obligation to this sucking up most of my time and motivation. And because I cannot for the life of me figure out which prompt it is I have yet to write and post. There's one more. I've gone over my numerically ordered folder time and time again and I just can't figure out which one it is, because all of them are listed as there and all of them appear completed.  
> So dang! This is the last one! Essentially a summation of the fics which were slightly cannon compliant; I see how many references to the other prompts I can cram into what turned out to be 11 pages on Word.

“…and in light of what the medic in particular was able to retrieve about the parameters of the Rash’s infection, the Council has decided to fund another mission into the Silent World, provided the team takes a different direction this time. Might we suggest that this time the crew are taken around the Danish wastes by sea and perhaps dropped in Central Europe? We understand that this is significantly riskier than any previous challenges they might have faced, but- Mrs Västerström, are you alright?”

Siv Västerström hastily wipes her eyes with a tissue offered by Taru Hollola “I’m fine, thank you.”

The Council-woman stares at her imperiously over the top of semi-circle glasses “Do you feel this challenge might be too much for the next mission?”

“What? No! No, gods no, of course not. I believe the team can take on anything together- provided that they are together…um, I wonder if the Council would mind if we used the same crew as the last time?”

Taru kicks Siv in the ankle surreptitiously and mutters from the corner of her mouth “Are you insane.”

Siv kicks her back, smiling at the Council “It’s just that they worked so well the last time. Many of them were rookies at the time, and look at how far each has managed to advance their careers? The experiences of the Silent World were quite invaluable to them, and I don’t know if introducing another batch of, well, rookies is the appropriate thing to do.”

“With the budget you’ll have this time around, you could hire any of the most experienced soldiers you want.” points out a Council-man with an astounding moustache “Besides, it has been a year and a half since the last mission. Are you sure the previous members will want to return?”

“Siv, be serious,” urges Taru under her breath. Her face is that of a woman facing down a raving monster with only her wits to defend herself; in fact, this is often how Taru has described Siv’s method of negotiations with the Council. 

“I’m sure they will return. And while it’s true most of them were young and inexperienced at the time, so is the fact that any of the most experienced soldiers would still be rookies to the Silent World. The team from the last mission are experienced. It is better to send half made of fledglings than some people who have never faced a Silent World troll.” Siv finds herself beaming with pride as she says this.

“Does this ‘team’ you mention include that Icelander that came in the carrots?” ask the woman with the glasses.

“Siv, if you say yes-”

“Of course,” Siv tucks a lock of hair behind her ear nervously “The Icelander you’re referring to just finished his first year in the mages’ academy with honours.”

“-I will kill you.” hisses Taru.

“Reynir is an accomplished mage by now. The last time I saw him he was speaking fluent Swedish. In fact, I can’t imagine continuing the mission without his contribution.” nor can she imagine the look on Reynir’s face when told that he will be a legitimate member of the team this time. He will at least cry on her through some profuse thanks.

“I’m afraid that I’ll have to recommend taking along at least one more mage.” a Council-member of indiscriminate gender flicks through a thick file in front of them “I understand the Hotakainen mage experienced some difficulty last year, protecting five other people and a cat from the spiritual attacks on his own.”

“We have a person in mind.” says Siv.

“Well as long as you’re sure.” says the first Council-woman, producing a gavel from some unseen pocket, and banging it “The next Long Winter is cleared to go ahead.”

 

(the mechanics’ garage in Keuruu)

When Tuuri hears the news, she screams “Congratulations!”

Patting her pregnant stomach, her co-worker smiles radiantly “If I can just figure out how to weasel some maternity leave out of the boss, I think it’ll be fine.”

“Let me know if you need me to cover any of your shifts this next month, alright? The ‘cuz and I aren’t due in Dalsnes for another month.”

With another round of squealing congratulations, Tuuri takes her leave of her co-worker and returns to her work. Or rather, the love of her life. The Tank, gleaming and polished and at least three times as powerful under the hood as it was during the Long Winter. Tuuri’s pet project. Every spare moment she has goes into perfecting the Tank, inside and outside.  
Because of the historical kudos the Tank gets for being the first vehicle to venture out into the hell of the Silent World in ninety years, Tuuri is allowed to keep it in a private garage, free of charge, and use whatever she needs to restore and improve it. The trainee skalds will often gather around the mouth of the garage to watch her work under the hood, whispering rumours of the Long Winter, of its mechanic’s legendary prowess with a wrench, of the time she allegedly snapped a näkki over her head.

This morning, before sliding under the Tank to look over the under-carriage, Tuuri strolls inside and fires up the radio. Even after eighteen months of an empty Tank, it is still weird for her to come in without tripping over boots drying on the front steps, to be able to walk without dodging through aisles between books.  
The others’ voices make this better. As nice and convenient as letters can be, nothing can quite replace the comfort that comes with hearing her friends’ voices. Emil, when he is in Mora, sometimes joined by Sigrun if they manage to snag the Dalsnes radio for a few moments. Reynir over at the Academy, during the once-weekly radio call he is allowed to make to his family and friends. Mikkel can usually be found at the end of the hospital’s radio, and even though this is his place of work, Tuuri will usually hear one or two of his younger siblings screeching in the background, and even more rarely she will hear Mikkela.

There is one person who she can rely to be on the other end of his radio. Faithfully, almost obsessively.

Torbjörn picks up within seconds “Hello?”

“Oh, Torbjörn! You sound awful!”

A scream in the background. Two in answer. A thunderous crash of paper and wood.

Torbjörn’s voice grows distant and fuzzy for a moment “Kids, I swear, if you knock over one more thing I’m coming in there!”

Tuuri giggles behind her hand “Having a rough time with the Norns?”

“I’m beginning to sympathise with the animals that eat their young. When Siv gets back, I’m going to sleep for four days.”

“Hang in there. You’re a good father, you know. The kids are lucky to have you to abuse.”

Torbjörn lets out a hollow laugh “They’ll behave so much better in a week, when Emil gets here.”

“Is he still in the wilds around Stockholm?”

“Yes. Didn’t you hear on the news? He was commended for single-handedly Cleansing Ericsson Globe.”

“He wrote to me about that. The way he told it, he accidentally locked himself in and had no choice but to Cleanse the whole thing.”

Torbjörn sighs “That sounds like my nephew.”

Another series of screeches in the background. This time, Tuuri can hear what they’re saying- “MOOOOOMMMAAAAA’S BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!”

Surprisingly, Siv returns their shriek of delight with one of her own. As the children clamour, she can be heard screaming to her husband “We did it! We have another mission! Tell Tuuri! Tell Lalli! Where the Hel is my stationary? I need to write to Mikkel and Reynir! Somebody get Dalsnes on the radio! Get Emil out of Stockholm!”

“Did you hear that?” asks Torbjörn.

The noise Tuuri makes is not quite human.

 

(The delivery room of Bornholm Hospital)

“Dr Madsen! There’s someone for you on the radio, from the Council!” a little waif of a message wallah peers around the door of the surgery, their eyes wide with fear. Either they are fearful of interrupting the delicate procedure or of Mikkel himself.

“Tell them I’m in the middle of something,” says Mikkel “Push, Mrs Larsson.”

“They said it can’t wait.” The message wallah bites their bottom lip and stares at tented blankets and the legs in stirrups.

“Neither can this child. I’ve got a star-gazer refusing to come out and some blasted idiot’s misplaced the forceps- push Mrs Larsson. Don’t try to hold your child in. Trust me, it’s not going to make this any easier.”

The bovine scream of a woman in labour sounds, scaring the messenger from the doorway.

“I’ll tell them what you said!” they shout over their shoulder.

An hour later, Mikkel drops into the radio chair, his scrubs covered in amniotic fluid. He picks up the headphones and rumbles “Madsen here. Apologies for the delay. I was in the middle of a difficult birth when you called.”

The voice on the other end he does not recognise, but it sounds like one of those self-important jackasses that tend to give him orders for a new mission “Oh, uh, congratulations. I didn’t realise you were pregnant.”

“I’m a midwife.” he barely stops himself from adding ‘you incredible moron’ “I’m assuming there’s another order from the PCTI?”

“Be careful about throwing that name around.”

“Oh please. I could scream that name at the top of my voice and no one would have any idea of what I was talking about.”

“It’s about the last mission you took, actually.”

Mikkel rubs his temples, forgetting his fingers are bloody “Wonderful. I assume I’m going back to investigate Mikkeli again?”

“No. I was referring to the Long Winter. The Council have just cleared the Västerströms to organise another, and we expect you to be on this one.”

“Ah.” says Mikkel.

“Well?”

“Yes. Of course I’ll go. Let me discuss this with my wife and family, though, before you announce anything.”

“Thank you. That is all I needed to hear.” then the mysterious jackass hangs up, leaving Mikkel slack in his seat.

Sighing, Mikkel dries his bloody hand on one of the few dry spaces on his scrubs, then fishes a charm out of his pocket. Not really a charm- just a rock he has attached incredible sentimental value to, and likes to carry around with him at all times.  
“Well, by all Reynir’s gods. We’re going to do that whole thing again.” he addresses the rock that looks like Sigrun “Hopefully the budget will allow for more than candle wax and carrots to eat this time.”

(Somewhere in Stockholm)

As is Emil’s custom, he has set everything on fire. Everything might be a bit of an exaggeration, though, since it is only the trolls he has set afire, and their panicked attempts to flee the stuff turning their backs to ash spreads the fire like butter on toast- if toast were the ruined shell of Stockholm. It reminds him of the time his team accidentally left him behind.   
For close to two hours, all he had to defend himself against the monsters in Bornholm was a flame-thrower and the stubborn belief that his team would be back for him, and did not intentionally abandon him, but abandoned him because Mikkel forgot to do the head-count before he cleared Tuuri to drive off.

He made it through that and he will make it through this. Still, Emil wishes he didn’t end up in desperate situations so often.

“Well I didn’t think this through,” Emil pushes some hair from his eyes “Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit.”  
Slinging the flame-thrower over his shoulder, he pulls a long, old-fashioned rifle from his other shoulder and plugs a flaming behemoth between the eyes of one screaming head. 

“Ukko almighty, Emil, why don’t you just roll in some salt and offer yourself to the troll’s barbeque? They keep running around like this and you’re going to get yourself hemmed in. Sigrun’s probably killing trolls in Dalsnes right now, and shivering, and she doesn’t exactly know why, but she has the vague notion that somewhere, somehow, one of her acolytes has fucked up.”

At his feet, Vala gives a solemn woof of agreement. She is content to sit at his feet and watch him correct his ridiculous mistake, while still with the feeling of participation because she growls ferociously at anything and everything currently in motion.  
The habit of talking to himself developed when he began to spend more time alone- barring Vala’s invaluable company, of course. He’s alone. Still unaccustomed to being alone in dead worlds. Fighting on his own, he can do, but he misses having another person to turn to and laugh with once the fight is over. Or cry on, depending how scared he was.

Due to the lack of volunteers to go to the Stockholm front, the powers that be have ended up sending in single Cleanser-feline units into the city by day to mop up what they can, who then return to cower at camp in the night. Emil didn’t want to bring Kitty into the mess and nor could he bring himself to work with another cat after the goofy splendour that Kitty is, so he persuaded the higher-ups to let him bring his childhood dog instead.

He’s been getting a lot more favours done for him since he came back from the silent world- eighteen months ago, by his count. A lot more people have expressed the desire to sleep with him than was usual for him pre-Long Winter. He isn’t interested, though.

“I wonder what he’s doing right now.” Emil muses under his breath, popping another troll in the head.

Probably sleeping up a tree, knowing Lalli. 

Just when the last of the trolls has gone down and Emil has begun to stamp out the small scattered fires, another figure emerges out of the smoke.

“DON’T SHOOT ME PLEASE!” 

Emil lowers his rifle “Who’s that?”

“I’m a message wallah! From the Headquarters!” 

“One of the over-worked, under-paid guys they send out when the radios are crapped out? What, are our radios crapped out?”

The message wallah is a young woman streaked with soot and shaking in her boots with terror. Emil has heard the stories from and about these poor people, and knows she has had to have been in some difficult areas before.   
This is probably the most difficult place she has ever had to venture into. Emil does not envy her; traipsing all this way to find an irritable Cleanser and his dog. On the bright side Vala is delighted to see another human being. She rushes over to the message wallah and immediately thrusts her face in the woman’s lap.

With a little yelp, the woman pushes Vala from her crotch “Uh, that’s…that’s a weird rifle. I’m sorry, I’m panic-babbling.”

Emil smiles “It’s alright, I do it too. This is a weird rifle, you’re right. Old Finnish stock. Hand-made by the first generation of survivor babies. Mine, in particular, by an angry old woman named Ensi with a penchant for head-butting people who disagreed with her in conversation.”

The message wallah finally returns his smile “Is that true? How’d you get it?”

“Friend of mine handed it off to me.”

Lalli had enough Swedish to explain why by then: “Since you’re going to be doing stupid things without me there to make sure they don’t kill you, take this.”

“Does it work?”

“Sure. It’s an antique, but it’s a solid model.”

With a deep sigh, the message wallah straightens and appears to collect herself “I know you’re him, but I’ve gotta ask for posterity’s sake. Are you Officer Emil Västerström?”

“Yep.”

“I’ve been sent to bring you back from Stockholm, sir. You’re needed in Mora.”

Emil’s heart skips a beat “Is someone sick?”

“No sir, it’s all good news. Another Long Winter has been approved. You’re due to leave in a month, if you’ll agree to go.”

Emil has turned around and started back to the base-camp at his top-speed before she can finish her sentence, Vala hot on his heels.

 

(The Great Hall of Dalsnes)

“…I can’t remember if that was after I was almost hit by the meteor, or after the time Mikkel accidentally set off a smoke-bomb, but the time isn’t really important. It was definitely one of the weirder moments of the mission. Even weirder than the time Em randomly got gashes on his back and then Lalli ran off into the woods and brought back this spirit to heal him- that’s another story. I was languishing in this pocket of rock waiting to die, with just a shaft of sun and a water-skin to keep me company, when all of a sudden this lady appears in front of me. Half of her is clean white bone and the other half looks like a shell-shocked soldier.”

“Was she naked?” asks Farouk.

Sigrun punches him in the shoulder “Not important, you horn-ball!”

“She was totally naked, wasn’t she?” Scary Sven’s rough face halves in a smile that looks more like a knife-wound “No disrespect to the gods, Lord Hel least of all, but there’s little I wouldn’t give to get a look at a naked Asgardian.”

“You’re all going to be eaten by svartalfs for that,” Sigrun manages not to laugh “Anyway, she came to me and started telling me I was going to die by the end of the day.”

Farouk grows solemn, placing a hand over hers across the table- and Sigrun lets him “And did you die?”

“Yes Farouk. I very obviously died.”

“Oh that’s a shame. When will the funeral be?”

Before Sigrun can get out a suitably witty and snarky come-back, Trond has appeared at her elbow, materialising out of nowhere like a grumpy bald spirit.  
He lays a wizened hand on her shoulder “You’ve got some news from Mora.”

Sigrun swivels to face him “Are the Norns alright? Did Siv have a break-through? What’s going on?”

Trond’s leathery face contains something as close to pride that Sigrun has ever seen him get since she came back from that first, disastrous mission “How do you feel about acting as Captain for the second Long Winter?”

“What?”

“It’s been cleared. What do you think?”

Trond is sturdy for an old man, and quite tolerant of his adoptive niece’s shenanigans. So he does not mind when she picks him up and swings him around.  
Once the initial moment of elation has passed, Sigrun grows quite serious and, still holding her uncle, asks “Listen, uncle, I’m kind of baby-sitting Lalli’s luonto’s kids. Could you get someone to pop out to the woods every Friday and make sure that the three juvenile lynx running around are well-fed? They’ll come if you whistle that old classic song, ‘Ophelia’. Ah, gods, I gotta go say bye to them!”

 

(The Icelandic Academy for the Magically Gifted)

Because Reynir misses his friends desperately, the company of his fellow students can become cloying very quickly. The laughter feels false without Tuuri’s loud laugh or Sigrun’s roar in the middle of it. It saddens Reynir that he can turn in his bed without driving an elbow into an irritable Finn- even the little interactions, the little cusses hissed at him in the middle of the night over howling winds, he misses these as badly as if he has lost a friend.

Five friends and a cat, to be exact. As fun as the other students are, Reynir has to grieve for the connections he has lost. Well, not lost, but starves in the absence of. He spent the last winter break in Dalsnes, as Sigrun had bound them all to do at the ending of the mission. For a few weeks, he felt alright, and with his improved Swedish he could actually communicate.

He celebrated the winter solstice with the Hotakainens. Emil taught him the steps to an old-fashioned ball-room dance, then how to work in a flamethrower. Sigrun went over the basics of hand-to-hand combat with him and taught him to fire a bow- and Mikkel was incredibly gracious about being clipped. He and Lalli explored the woods around Dalsnes, met with the local spirits and listened to their fylgja and luonto bickering in the manner of an old pair of friends. Tuuri played with his hair so much her fingers had new callouses by the end of the break and debated endlessly over subjects like the best kind of snow and which type of meat tastes the best (Reynir stands firm by mutton). Mikkel was the same grounding, reassuring presence he had been in the Tank, but by virtue of no longer being in perpetual danger had also revealed himself as a phenomenal prankster.

“I just wonder if I’m fixating too much,” he says “I mean it’s not exactly healthy. My friends aren’t perfect. I shouldn’t put so much of myself into just these few people, right?”

Dog is on his back and twisted at an odd angle in his effort to get the best possible belly-rub out of Reynir “Why not? You can trust them. You know you can trust them.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

They are sitting underneath the trees that ring the courtyard of the academy. A ways off, a couple of groups of students have clotted together around the stairs, leaning against the walls of the academy. Reynir wanted his space today. No one but him and his fylgja. 

“Because you know Lalli hated us for the first month of the mission.”

Reynir nods “But we persisted, and he caved and now we’re good friends…I wish I wasn’t too tired to visit his haven now. We’ve gotten farther apart, I think, since we left the Tank.”

Dog flips on his side, his tail thumping the grass “It’s probably geographical. I wouldn’t worry about it- a little higher please.”

“You know the Hotakainens had a dog when Lalli was a baby? It was his father’s dog, but I guess they all kind of owned it. Its name was Ville.”

Dog cocks an ear quizzically “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I’m wondering if Ville was half as needy as you are.” Reynir tickles Dog’s belly until he is leapt upon and licked in return.

When the teacher comes to Reynir, he is rolling in the grass with his fylgja planted on his chest and slobbering all over him. He lets out a disapproving cluck.

Reynir and Dog straighten and stand immediately.

“Sir.” croaks Reynir.

Dog tries not to make eye-contact with the stern crow sitting on the teacher’s shoulder- a fylgja he has run afoul of before. 

“Árnason. You’re going to have to come with me. I need to set you up with a winter’s worth of assignments and studies.” The teacher casts a disparaging glance Dog’s way, and furrows his brow so deeply his eyebrows seem in danger of teetering over into a canyon.

“What for?”

“No one told you? Well I suppose the news just came in. You’re needed to go on the second round. Another Long Winter has just been announced by the Council, and you were requested for the team, by name.”

The noise which Reynir makes is slightly less human than the noise Tuuri made before him. 

 

(Just outside the walls of Keuruu)

“Wait, wait, was the collapsed haven before or after you fought Joulupukki?”

“After,” Lalli pauses to remove Kitty’s claws from the skin of his neck “I don’t want to talk about that spirit. I want to talk about havens.”

But Onni does not want to let it rest. The thought of his baby cousin facing off against a holy spirit is about as terrifying as the thought of what revenge might be exacted against him “We need to talk about Joulupukki! You can’t just go around killing off gods, no matter how sick they are-”

“Who will sanction me? Most of the gods are hidden away. Sleeping. Too sick or weak to protest. And anyway, I have the protection of Mielikki.”

“You don’t have her protection from me.” Onni peels off a glove and smacks Lalli on the back of the head “I swear to the gods, if you ever involve yourself in such a dangerous fight ever again, I will run you over with a tractor. Eleven times. One for each miniature heart-attacks your stupid shenanigans have given me so far! And if there’s more, I don’t even want to know about it!”

Kitty purrs. For some reason she likes it when Onni raises his voice. She must find it comforting, in the same way the cub of a wild cat finds its mother’s warning growl comforting. 

They go on in silence for a few moments. Lalli allows Onni a few moments to cool off, to look back on what he said and regret what he has to regret.   
Spending months trapped in confined spaces with other people (all of whom he is certain could be certified insane or psychotic by any mental health organisation operating in the Known World) has taught him a little more patience, a little more skill with reading people. He is more forgiving- both to himself, for being slower on the up-take and sometimes completely oblivious to subtext, and to others for being impatient with these ways that are strange, perhaps rude to them.

Onni included. Funny how the man that has spent the better part of his life raising Lalli manages to be puzzling and alien, but at least now Lalli feels a little better equipped to investigate the mystery of his cousin. 

When they have gone on in silence for a few moments, Onni gently plucks Kitty from Lalli’s hood and balances her on his shoulder “I’ve never seen you so calm with another cat before.”

Lalli shrugs as Kitty purrs and pushes her wet nose into the back of Onni’s neck “She grew on me.”

“Good. I’m glad. Now why did you ask me about non-magical havens earlier?”

As the thought of Emil asleep in that barrow always does, the mention of it aloud quickens Lalli’s pulse. He breathes deeply before he answers “Hypothetically. Reynir asked a question and it got me thinking.”

“Reynir asked you questions?” Onni cocks an eyebrow in surprise “And you responded?”

“After a while…I wasn’t always that nice to him.” 

Onni claps him on the shoulder unexpectedly, making Lalli jump “Sorry Lalli-cat. I’ve just- I mean Ukko almighty, I’ve never seen you-”

“Willingly make friends?” finishes Lalli.

“Yeah.”

“It was either that or kill him.”

The corner of Onni’s mouth quirks up in what might be a smile- Lalli hasn’t seen him smile since Onni was sixteen, so can hardly remember what one of Onni’s smiles looks like “What you said about non-magical havens. Of course they exist. You know that. You’ve been to Tuuri’s- tripped over her, last time, if I’m remembering correctly.”

“I know, I know…but what would have to happen for a non-mage’s dreamscape avatar to wake up?”

Kitty’s tail winds around Onni’s face and under his nose, giving him a strange moustache “Gods, I don’t know if that’s possible.” 

“If it was.”

“Why? Did you see something like that?”

“No,” Lalli thinks of the black oil of the svartalfs climbing his legs, of a stag’s golden fur “Just wondered. Tuuri wondered.”

“I don’t think anything could rouse a non-mage in the dreamscape. They just aren’t made for it-”

“SLOOOOOW DOWN YOU LONG-LEGGED BASTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARDS!”

They have been so caught up in their discussion that neither of them registers Tuuri’s charge through the woods until she breaks through the foliage and screeches to a messy halt in front of them. Her face is red, her forehead damp with sweat, her hair decorated by twigs and leaves.  
Gasping for breath, Tuuri bends her knees and coughs a few times.

“Gods-damn you,” she wheezes “And your stupid legs.”

Lalli offers her his water-skin. She drains it in three gulps and burps impressively “Thanks Lalli-cat. I’ve got the best news.”

Onni squints suspiciously “Are you getting another promotion? I think your boss might be trying to groom you to be his new girlfriend.”

“No, Owlie, shut your traitorous mouth. We’re going to Mora next month.”

“Why?” Lalli’s heart skips a beat at the thought of seeing Emil again anyhow- it’s been a month and two weeks since they last saw each other, which is far too long in his opinion “We aren’t going back to Dalsnes yet.”

“No. Listen. Onni’s going to come with us. Onni’s going to see the Norns-”

“Their names are Malin, Nils and Sayyida, thank you-” and then Onni chokes on the rest of his sentence (and a bit of cat paw), realising what has just been said.

“And we’re going on to a second Long Winter.” says Lalli, with finality “We’re going through that tiny Tuonela all over again.”

Tuuri glows “And all the others are coming back the same! And we’re bringing Onni!”

“Hey, I wasn’t consulted-”

“I don’t know why that makes me happy.”

Again, Onni chokes on his sentence, because Lalli has just started to laugh for the first time in as long as he can remember, which sets Tuuri off, which sets him off, which sets Kitty off into a fit of joyful yowling, and their hysterics are carried by the wind until they reach the walls of Keuruu and at last ebb into silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who read this, commented, kudos'ed, to those who offered criticisms and caught it when I made typos and other mistakes, like with the language translations. Basically thanks to the people who have been around for this ridiculous, lengthy prompt challenge. If I had known it was going to take about half a year to do maybe I would have been a little less enthusiastic about diving into it?  
> And to my fellow writers who are working through it at a sane pace (rather than a frantic, diarrhoea-like pace like yours truly), I'm loving what everyone's done so far and I look forwards to reading more in the future.
> 
> From this prompt challenge I'm going to write that fic I toyed with. A full-length fic using the idea of Emil as a sleeping king in a barrow and Lalli as the confused and infatuated guide and Sigrun as the blood-thirsty side-kick. Really, everyone gets in on the fun. I'll finish the relationships challenge first and maybe fire off a few one-shots before I begin to post it, just to give myself a break.
> 
> The working title is 'Spring-cleaning the barrow of a forgotten king' (and I hate it and will probably use one of the weirder ideas, like 'Non-sequitur saga of a forgotten king' or 'And Fenris danced'
> 
> Again, thanks to everyone, to basically the whole forum and the wonderful Minna herself for producing such fantastic original material. I'll see you guys around!


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